Sure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally.
And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe.
This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.
This might work if Chinese models are on par with US models or slightly worse.
However if Chinese models start to become noticeably better[0] than US models, it will be hard to hold the line and businesses would start risking using illegal models to get an business advantage, which would be as simple as making HTTP requests to an inference provider outside the US.
The AI companies themselves show that there's a high capacity for lawlessness in corporate America, such as e.g. Meta and Anthropic downloading Library Genesis and getting away with a slap on the wrist.
[0] Chinese models exceeding US models could come sooner rather than later. Stock Kimi K3 is slightly worse than the frontier but it could improve with further post-training, and the weights will be released imminently. All it takes is for China to get a good pretrain and release that model into the world.
No they cannot, legally speaking, and companies do not want to face sanctions avoidance charges, so practically speaking no American company will touch the European model hosts either.
In 5 to 10 years most of EU will be partnering with China, not US. Banking will become more "Chinese centric" and most of EU will show a middle finger to US with its FATCA, DMCAs, sanctions and other BS.
The parent comment, emphasis mine.
> Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US.
Sure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally.
And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe.
This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.
This might work if Chinese models are on par with US models or slightly worse.
However if Chinese models start to become noticeably better[0] than US models, it will be hard to hold the line and businesses would start risking using illegal models to get an business advantage, which would be as simple as making HTTP requests to an inference provider outside the US.
The AI companies themselves show that there's a high capacity for lawlessness in corporate America, such as e.g. Meta and Anthropic downloading Library Genesis and getting away with a slap on the wrist.
[0] Chinese models exceeding US models could come sooner rather than later. Stock Kimi K3 is slightly worse than the frontier but it could improve with further post-training, and the weights will be released imminently. All it takes is for China to get a good pretrain and release that model into the world.
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No they cannot, legally speaking, and companies do not want to face sanctions avoidance charges, so practically speaking no American company will touch the European model hosts either.
In 5 to 10 years most of EU will be partnering with China, not US. Banking will become more "Chinese centric" and most of EU will show a middle finger to US with its FATCA, DMCAs, sanctions and other BS.