Comment by -1
8 days ago
Replace every instance of "PRC" with "U.S.", DeepSeek with OpenAI/Anthropic, and replace "U.S." with any other nation, and maybe remove the last sentence. How does it sound now? Both nations may as well just say it - "we're banning it because they're our closest competitor".
>How does it sound now?
It sounds logical and sound? As a US citizen, I (a) agree that we shouldn't be allowing government employees to use AI services from adversary foreign governments and (b) that other countries shouldn't be allowing their government employees to use AI services from adversary foreign governments (which the US should be considered for plenty of countries).
>Both nations may as well just say it - "we're banning it because they're our closest competitor".
I guess we're just ignoring the national security implications lol
If I were China, I would ban US models from being used by my government for the same reasons.
They are already banned from Chinese Govt Ministry use, ChatGPT is banned, and US model providers try to block mainland China IP origins. However they are still heavily used by industry, and some would say that is part of wide spread distillation efforts. I doubt there are many queries from China that are not logged by one or more LLM routers.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/23/china-cha...
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202607/1365448.shtml
https://netaskari.substack.com/p/chinese-llm-model-routing
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3353002/shadow...
The difference is that local US companies have agency to refuse government overreach while Chinese companies are weaker in this regard. Chinese companies are more vulnerable to its govts pressure.
National Security Letters.
Or, worst comes to worst, as Snowden has revealed, the NSA will just clandestinely hack American companies, as they did to Google when they rolled out TLS for search.
As it has been proven multiple times with the current US administration, no, US companies do not have the agency to refuse government overreach, they can just purchase favours (which I highly doubt is different from PRC and its government).
> The difference is that local US companies have agency to refuse government overreach
We're on HN, not The Onion's comment section. People will take this seriously rather than sarcasm.
It was sarcasm, right?
I was referring to Google’s lawsuit on US government to refuse their subpoena. Google has agency to refuse by going to court and even publicizing the events against a gag order.
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