Comment by m11a
2 hours ago
Step 1: Chinese company publishes open weights on HF
Step 2: European company distills or just adjusts the model slightly, and publishes its model on HF
Step 3: American company uses model from step 2. Has to testify under oath where they got it from. "We got it from these French guys"
That French guy takes risk to be forever under US warrants for breaking American law, denied access to financial institutions even in Europe and will quickly go to some KYC entity list, and you will be notified as his clients to stop using his model.
Or you think all kind of fraud can be committed through some "french guy"?
Also, I am not confident, receiving illegal materials from French guy gates you from personal liability.
I presume such US legislation isn't going to try claim worldwide jurisdiction to block all persons worldwide from using Chinese models. In which case, the French guy wouldn't be violating American law.
As for the American company, it's pretty difficult to check the provedance of open weights. It's even difficult to check the provedance of open source code, because chains of attribution aren't always clear. I posted elsewhere that Anthropic's MCP Python SDK is a fork of an open source project with the attribution removed. We saw the same with Cursor's Composer model, which didn't attribute its Chinese base. It's very hard to claim an American company should be liable for using a purportedly European model with attribution removed.
> I presume such US legislation isn't going to try claim worldwide jurisdiction to block all persons worldwide from using Chinese models. In which case, the French guy wouldn't be violating American law.
legislation will block importing Chinese models to the US
> As for the American company, it's pretty difficult to check the provedance of open weights.
government or some companies can build benchmarks/system which will give y/n answer
But it will claim worlwide juridistcion , just as all interpreations of the law are in Washington nowadays. Its how a commercial deal between A Chines company(Huawei) and an Iranian telco ends up with Canada reying to rendition a executive for violating US laws. The goal is to spread as much FUD as needed to dissuade anyone form using the Open models and herding them back to the propreity ones.