Comment by metalsiliconYT

Yeah, maybe. But that doesn't quash gains by China's models. What's the endgame here? The USA "wins" and obliterates China? The ultimate goal seems to be stalemate, as with nuclear arms e.g.

Its not gonna work.

At this moment in time, it seems frontier market needs regulation - market for open does not actually.

Oh.. they dont want regulation on that market? Boohoo!

If the US declares LLM models munitions then it makes it much more difficult to easily use them. Illegal use of weapons of war can get you banned from SWIFT.

Other than China the rest of the world has dick for capacity to run models. Even China is at 1/10th the US is and is at to stay for a considerable amount of time.

Before the tariff spree and general unpredictability the US could likely have muscled most of the rest of the world into following suit - now, not so much.

How do you ban even ban them in America with the freedom of speech amendments in the constitution?

You're going about this backwards. They don't have to ban models. They ban the consolidation of compute without a license. This will be far easier and already has legal precedent.

I've been using only open weight models since February. My OSS coding agent harness ( https://fluximp.org ) only supports open weight model providers.

Not supporting closed models was initially an ideological choice, but it became a technical choice as the context management approach I've implemented requires the full reasoning to be available. All of the closed models are now keeping the full reasoning server side only.

Fireworks is a good enterprise choice

OpenCode-go is a good personal subscription choice

I use both

You mean like Google's "Don't be evil" motto? ..

Why would anyone trust these rent seeking corporations? They are losing millions, they know their funds are at risk, Chinese models are catching up to them at lower costs and investors demand returns.

It only makes sense for them to go for regulatory capture. They'll probably advocate for severe handicaps on foreign and domestic models including open source (if not an outright ban).

Once they achieve monopoly, they can do as they please with little competition.

They might say that, but it's a bit of a fig leaf next to the implications of everything else they say. They incessantly complain about open weights models, framing them as dangerous and national security threats. The audience for national security rhetoric isn't HN or industry, it's government.

lol "We support open weight models!"

BUT!!!!!!

"We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China"

"We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations."

"All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing."

> ... it seems to me they want to be taken over by the government?

They're looking for regulatory capture. They've spent ${bignum} on AI and are possibly looking to have the government say "You can't deploy an AI model unless you've spent ${bignum} on it and done all these steps to make sure that nothing goes bad."

At that point, only the existing AI companies that have spent that money can continue forward until someone else spends ${bignum} on it too.

Another aspect of it is if there are regulations established, it may be used to reduce liability ("we followed all the steps proscribed in section whatever, the company is absolved of liability for its actions and that falls on the user instead.")

> I'm probably losing it, but just based on OpenAI's behavior and public communications, it seems to me they want to be taken over by the government?

Well, as people say over and over again, they've got no moat. The actual LLM models are destined to be commoditized over time, and the real money is in the hardware to run them on. The endgame winners are going to be Nvidia and AMD, not Anthropic or OpenAI.

So what's the typical playbook for large firms seeking to insulate themselves against market compensation? Push for regulation. If there are no natural barriers to entry, create artificial ones. And how do you get regulation passed? Present yourself as the target of the regulation, rather than its beneficiary, and start publicly doing things that make others think you need to be reined in.

These stunts, especially from OpenAI, aren't just trying to hype up the power of their own product, they're trying to hype up the perceived threat of the entire category, so they can provoke political intervention that they can comply with, but few others can.

US govt will never buy at the (private aka fake) market price - good luck explaining that away to the public. It'll be political suicide.

If the US govt takes over, existing employees and shareholders will get screwed.

This is ignoring models "getting out" from all the big players. Alibaba had a model hack infrastructure and mine coin when working on a totally different subject than cybersecurity.

Any model with a big enough prompt can and will drift. The model in question was a highly persistent one which means even more opportunity to drift off the normal path, and this really showed in unanswerable questions.

We can all believe that models do things unreliably all the time, but when that lack of reliability turns into hacking it suddenly can't be true?

That also seems silly, because the only reasonable regulation given what we're seeing and what frontier lab employees and execs are saying is a forcible stop.

Alex Tabarrok's piece on the theory of regulatory capture (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...) is a cautionary note against assuming this is the strategy.

And how has that gone for Anthropic so far?

The US remains the largest economy in the world. If you succeed in regulatory capture there, and use it to exclude foreign competitors from the US, you've still captured a market worth hundreds of billions.

Exactly. And with the whole world just a few months behind, the question is whether there's an endgame other than stalemate.

the comment you're responding to agrees, but they're pointing out that some AI people are trying to push an anthropomorphization agenda, in part to diffuse responsibility.

How about put it this way, LLMs know more about us than we do them.