Well, force is a strong word… it’s still just accords, that the US doesn’t seem to be valuing lately… so if they say no, what’s the US going to do? Start a war over a company?
This is how the US gov does business now, capricious and vengeful.
Textbook retaliation for not letting them use an abliterated version of Claude in weapons systems.
This effectively renders any US closed model useless for any foreign company. Could happen to OpenAI, Google, etc. Too much of a risk to implement something that can be yanked out because the company didn’t behave the way they want.
Looks like it’s time for Kimi, Z, Deepseek to take the front row. They’ll catch up in a few months anyway. Kimi code 2.6 is crazy good
This is a suicide shot for the American economy. The numbers only lined up for AI to rescue the USA from its debt if it captured a significant portion of the world's AI spend, and while it was a longshot before, there's basically zero percent chance the world trusts American AI when the government is pulling strings.
It was a zero percent chance anyway. Look at Europe working to leave American software behind in recent years. And it was greatly accelerated by leveraging American AI to build the exit.
You can read it all over HN. It's about weakening American influence and building Eurocentric economies and influence. And exercising the same level of choice that Americans prefer as well. Americans also want to escape Google, Microsoft and Apple and more. They've all been caught investing too heavily in government influence and thought control (aka marketing).
And on the other side of that, an American company that deprives the US of AI for defense, is defacto weakening American defense because competition militaries will gain a technological edge by simply taking control of AI companies in their country which the US hasn't done (yet).
There are very valid arguments on both sides, I think.
> The numbers only lined up for AI to rescue the USA from its debt if it captured a significant portion of the world's AI spend
The numbers lined up if those companies created something resembling AGI, the USA companies captured a large share of the world, and there was lack of competition so those companies could capture a large share of the value.
"When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone."
This is fearful stuff on all sides, and none of the people involved might realistically be able to navigate the danger.
Open models will catch up eventually, TOTL models will get distilled into smaller, more efficient versions, it’s not something you can moat indefinitely
China will, but they'll only be useable by hackers torrenting it and running it on small GPU clusters you learn about on IRC. Everything old is new again.
"What this degradation represented was both the capability and willingness of Anthropic to silently alter its models to achieve its policy preferences. In other words, Anthropic willfully validated some of its critics’ worst fears in terms of being a supply chain risk."
a) Anthropic believe that AI is an extinction level risk and that they are the only leading AI lab which takes safety seriously. In combination this puts them in the position of believing that they are the only ones who can save the world, which is reasonable to call a god complex.
b) Anthropic are engaging in actions which aquire and consolidate power in the form of control over powerful AI.
c) "The history of brilliant people convinced they know what humanity needs is a sordid one, precisely because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good, justifying actions that very much are not."
I'm describing claims from the article and would not word them so strongly myself. But this explicitly does not assume evil intent.
It's also a reminder that as soon as Chinese models take the lead, they will switch to closed source too... so let's not be complacent, we need stronger, completely open data models, open source code, etc. to mitigate this risk
Most of qwen's model is open source, but qwen max is closed source.
Also if you believe that they are not burning billions for charity, in my thinking making the model closed or restricted is the way to earn return on their investment.
How do you figure that? “also a reminder that as soon as Chinese models take the lead, they will switch to closed source too”
What specifically about their release strategy “reminded” you of that conjecture?
The premise that they only open source the models … because it somehow helps them leapfrog American labs, and once they actually can leapfrog them, they’d close source them, doesn’t really track for me. Am I missing something?
I mean I think we need our own domestic open weight labs. I just don’t particularly understand the point you’re making
The point I’m making is that this has become a strategic resource. The Chinese government allows wide sharing of their models because is weakens the US position.
If Chinese models become better than Americans, do you believe the CCP will allow the free distribution of their flagship models?
Why wouldn't they? It keeps strengthening their position. It's an incredible source of soft power if they're seen as the place to look for good AI, and what's more, you can self-host it or hire a local provider if you're worried about data sovereignty.
I guess it's a possibility, but I don't have that kind of expectations from major world powers. It's not like the CCP is a beacon of human rights either.
‘Why wouldn’t anyone give away frontier AI?’ sounds like ‘why wouldn’t anyone give away uranium enrichment?’
i.e. I can’t comprehend the state of mind and the world model of anyone asking a question like that, which is apparently quite a few folks here on HN!
They already are, to an extent. If we believe Amodei's nutjob take that Mythos/Fable are the end of the world in the wrong hands, we should have an open source Chinese model within 6-12 months that's already end-of-world level, so the cat is going to be way out of the bag long before the US labs go out of business.
> should have an open source Chinese model within 6-12 months that's already end-of-world level
that's the exact thing I'm talking about. I don't see why is half the people around here so sure that China will continue to release anything at all. they are releasing non-frontier models on a 6-month lag, yes, but the reasons why to release them are overshadowed by reasons to not do that for mythos-class models. IOW why would they give away a dual use technology just like that?
> the reasons why to release them are overshadowed by reasons to not do that for mythos-class models
Why? What are those reasons? How come they don't already exist for DeepSeek V4 or GLM-5.2?
By the way, I'm not going to entertain the "mythos-class" phrasing because I really don't think it's important. I don't believe Anthropic's take on it being the threshold towards the end of the world that their marketing insists it is.
I’ve been piloting frontier LLMs for as long as anyone outside of the labs and I just disagree. It is a tier above for some tasks (especially in my usage) and not a downgrade on anything I tried it on. This is enough for me to rank it higher; ymmv.
I've only briefly tried it and it did seem quite capable for what I was doing, but not that much better than the Chinese models I've been mostly using.
In any case, this [0] seems to paint a more reasonable picture than "it's much better than anything else at everything".
They would still be at a significant compute disadvantage and deploying them worldwide seems to be how they work around that currently as they put together a homegrown alternative.
Oh i don't expect this to happen any time soon, but they are making progress on the UV lithography side, so it's just a matter of time until it becomes a TW race, and they have the advantage on that terrain.
And I think we're at human-level intelligence for restricted tasks now. it's not the big bad AGI* we were promised, it's more like Rainman that needs a handler, but that doesn't make it any less useful. So I'm not sure what this future event will signify.
*And the ASI IMO doesn't happen without robots going full von Neumann replicator. Something I don't expect to happen any time soon.
I’m going to shamelessly reuse the Rainman that needs a handler analogy
More seriously, the epistemic doubt relating to the evolution of these machines is quite something… what do we do if “intelligence” doesn’t have a ceiling, and we end up a bunch of (comparatively) dumb monkeys with AI caretakers/handlers?
Absolutely, wouldn't be the first phrase I've pushed into meme space ;-)...
What happens if the AIs get smarter than us at doing things? Well, I always hired smarter people than myself at the things I needed to get done. But if you're worried about them realizing they can get smarter doing the things at which you are the expert, the long-term is likely BCI and even more blurring of the definitions of sentience and consciousness IMO. And with 20-30 years left on my lifeclock, I'm not sure I will live to see that day, but I absolutely do think I will be around long enough to see a few miracles like the end of cancer and Alzheimer's.
Thankfully this isn’t the case, but given that true believers actually think this and go on trying to build it, it seems they may not belong in human society or at least they deserve a bit of a spanking for trying to genocide mankind
I'm not an accelerationist out to build the ASI at all costs no matter what ASAP, but if I take the long view in combination with the Dark Forest and Fermi's Paradox, it seems like if we don't ultimately follow this path to its end, someone else who did genocides us instead. I don't see why it has to end badly for us, but I get why letting the current crop of power drunk mean girl billionaires crash the collective car into a tree in pursuit of it does.
What makes you think there is a ceiling to intelligence beyond energy (of which there's a lot more to harvest yet if we just pulled our heads out of our fossil fueled asses)?
Maybe, but it could aöso be that they’re looking closeöy at the risks and negative externalities of the way things are currently being done in the US. I.e. bu and for the disproportionate benefit of a tiny elite, allied with a veru polarizing and unpredictaböe political leadership, while the vast majoruty are incredibly anxious and resentful about it all.
China is currently ahead in all aspects pf ”AI” other than the specific niche of frontier LLMs, and for all their faults seem more interested in maintaining social cohesion (which has its own dystopian aspects, obv) and disseminating the technology and its presumed benefits throughout society, rather than ”beating the US”.
Not necessarily, commoditize your complement is a common strategy USA & Europe are more services heavy than China which seems to have advantage at manufacturing these days if AI trained on everybody data can replace some of it than it reduce China depend on others, increase demands from other countries to china's manufacturing and reduce their dependence on USA & Europe and reduce USA & Europe bargaining chip in any future negotiate.
z.ai posted an announcement earlier that day (in GMT+8) saying that they will make GLM-5.2 available later today at 5:21pm so it can't be a coincidence.
It’s just Occam’s razor since it specifically references “ Today, the sudden restriction of certain frontier models is deeply regrettable.” in the tweet.
5:21 comes twice a day, so they could have got it all ready if they wanted to. But I guess a lot can happen in 12 hours, and it could be a missed opportunity if Fable were re-released in that time.
Somewhat. The US Gov can make it illegal to transact with, download, use, etc. foreign open weight models.
Of course, enforcement will be difficult for individuals (businesses will comply by default, and they would all be pulled off Github and other US based hosting locations if they went the sanctions route). But, we are also quickly going down the road of frightening levels of mass surveillance, which could aid enforcement.
The Fable situation sets a very dangerous precedent, and I'm not looking forward the future here. We are losing the fight for information and computing freedom.
I think that this is what OpenAI/Anthropic want but they wont say it publicly. The will be OK with the US banning regulating and banning open source models as it let's Anthropic and OpenAI charge huge premiums to American business clients for their models.
Also the marketing of them getting to say "our models are so dangerous" only a few companies or select users are allowed to use (benchmark) them would help keep their valuations high.
In the United States it’s illegal to sell Chinese EVs. It’s also illegal to download copyrighted music and movies. Which one do you suppose illegal open-weight models would more closely resemble?
Since I am not familiar with the law, can you expand on the mechanism by which the US government could making downloading openly licensed files illegal? How would the government avoid denying people their first amendment rights by doing this?
There's a few different levers they can pull, most of them economic & commerce. IEEPA and OFAC sanctions primarily.
They don't have to criminalize the act of downloading open weight models to effectively block access (to foreign open weight models, they have less levers to pull for US based models).
With sanctions and commerce rules though, they can unilaterally prevent all US based businesses from hosting & using them. They will need to be pulled off huggingface, github, gitlab, etc. ISPs could be put on the hook for folks torrenting them as well because technically that could be considered providing serivces to a sanctioned entity. There doesn't need to be monetary exchange.
Likewise, they can use export controls & sanctions to prohibit US companies and individuals from contributing to foreign open source projects as well.
If it went to court, the DOJ would argue that model weights are not speech because it is machine-readable parameters, and not used as a medium of human communication like source code.
Lastly, first amendment rights are unfortunately not absolute since the PATRIOT act. US Gov just has to declare a national security threat and all your rights go out the window.
I mean my state has been making it illegal to download 3d models of pieces that could be used to make guns in a 3d printer
It’s a very broad law and likely not legal, but it’s going to take a long time to be fought through the courts, and in the meanwhile people will probably be arrested for creating or sharing a file for something that may be able to become a gun part.
You’re correct that it shouldn’t be a thing but unfortunately American society is not in a good place right now
Yes, obviously. The US has no jurisdiction outside of the US (except for economic sanctions, which the US could in theory put sanctions on other countries that use models from sanctioned countries).
Oh, you think? The US have a habit of imposing sanctions on companies that don't respect their prohibitions- so for example they decided that companies cannot offer services to a certain EU citizen in the EU otherwise they'll be in a sea of troubles. In theory, imposing these so called "secondary sanctions" is against international law; in practice, the EU is so spineless that doesn't even dare to protest.
Honestly, banning SOTA LLM services is the best thing the US could do for AI.
It’d force people to run inference locally, and that’d expose the actual $/perf of the models instead of keeping it secret then propping it up with circular revenue and blatant securities fraud.
If we don’t do something like that, we won’t have much of an AI industry post-bubble.
I wouldn't bet on it. Chinese live the free market ideals instead of just preaching them but rent-seeking and seeking regulatory capture at the first opportunity. In China business doesn't control politics. Dynamics is completely different and so might be the outcomes.
The fact that politics controls businesses there might lead to, but doesn't necessarily ensure, a "brighter future". It's pretty common knowledge that authoritarian regimes can, especially in extreme, disastrous situations on a large enough scale, function better than less centralized and more open organizations. The problem is that there's less resistance to directing that effectiveness toward something that will make at least some people's futures much darker.
Then again, just because business controls politics doesn't mean there's much more decentralization or openness, either. In the end, the main advantage of this model was predictability - sure, we have an "inner circle" that forces its policies in both cases, but the businesses are at least predictable in their decision making, always chasing profit, based on hard numbers, unlike the other side chasing whatever flavor of ideology they believe in (or want to sell) this month... Wait. I just recalled "colonies on Mars" and "metaverse," and the cognitive dissonance made me blank out for a sec here.
In any case: while the Chinese model seems to have some upsides, especially compared to the current situation in a few other places on the globe, I don't believe it has a significantly higher chance of helping us achieve a "brighter future". I may be depressed, but in virtually every scenario from this point, I can only see a bleak future ahead of us. Getting to AGI under current conditions makes for completely unpredictable societal and political chaos, yet not getting there (and fast) risks the bubble bursting (causing, of course, unpredictable economic and, by extension, societal and political chaos). The longer the current situation persists, the lower the probability of finding an off-ramp that won't upend everybody's and their dog's lives. Yet, there is no incentive to back off from the race either.
I really wonder what's next - what kind of poop will finally hit the fan, and when exactly?
You criticize the government, perhaps rightfully, but give Anthropic a pass. They are the ones fueling this bullshit. Downgrading your results without telling you. Refusing your requests in the name of “safety”. Even if the government didn’t make them pull the model for foreigners, we’d still be in a really shitty situation because Anthropic is really shitty.
I don't criticize based on vibes. The US government is overreaching, seemingly as a retaliation for Anthropic's refusal to let the US use a jailbroken version of their software in autonomous lethal systems. Hegseth is like a drunk vindictive ex
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