Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

Extra Judicial punishment and unwanted attention from powerful organizations is absolutely on the table for any larger startup/company who finds themselves in his radar

dashundchen• 2 hours ago

Because the spineless cowards in Congress are somehow afraid of an 80 year old demented man nearing a 30% approval rating.

Their inability to find a backbone helps them contort to whatever Trump babbles that day, even if privately they know something is idiotic or illegal.

If you want a prime example, look at how Thom Tillis suddenly finds the ability to speak out once he lost his primary.

root_axis• 2 hours ago

Have you been paying attention the last two years? With a few exceptions, he has unilateral authority.

vrganj• 1 hour ago

The "try and stop me" authority of a guy that has armed goons marching down city streets and brutalizing his opposition.

misiti3780• 2 hours ago

he cant shut them off anyways, anyone can just VPN to europe and download them

andai2• 2 hours ago

The ducks at the park are free, you can just take one home with you.

minimaltom• 2 hours ago

I luv this sentence but have no idea what it means lol.

Do you have many ducks at home?

thewebguyd5• 2 hours ago

Individuals can. The US GOV can make it so legally risky for US based corporations to host, download, or integrate with foreign open weight models that they become effectively illegal for commercial use. Any sort of sanctions or ICTS regulations, and you'll see them all rapidly disappear from AWS, Azure, GCP, HuggingFace, GitHub, etc.

feverzsj• 2 hours ago

The only thing Trump can do is building the US version of GFW, which he knows better than anyone else.

acmnrs• 2 hours ago

Almost 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator…

The Proton Foundation<https://proton.me> is a Swiss non-profit based in Geneva. I'm not sure which other “Proton” the article could be referring to.

tencentshill• 2 hours ago

We must all hoard all available models before they get taken down. Is anyone archiving huggingface?

throwa3562622• 2 hours ago

Post this to

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder

cayley_graph• 2 hours ago

giancarlostoro• 2 hours ago

I think this would be foolish, a more sound strategy is to focus on critical infrastructure and defense not using models that are "open" but they're really just binary blobs. We have models here in the states like OLMo that could receive more investing to attempt to bring them up to par with some of the frontier open-weight models, removing a lot of these concerns.

chrisnight• 2 hours ago

the US can “sanction” companies that engage in intellectual property theft.

Peak hypocrisy, US AI companies can train on unlimited intellectual property with 0 rights to it, while Chinese AI companies have to explicitly get the rights to data that isn’t even copyrightable/copyrighted (since AI alone can’t copyright it).

hnfong2• 2 hours ago

It's not IP theft if US courts say it isn't.

And if the accused company is outside of the US, well, US courts have no jurisdiction so apparently the US government can just claim they are guilty and impose the sanctions...

Frieren• 2 hours ago

The USA has stolen intellectual property from ALL AROUND THE WORLD. AI is not trained just in copyrighted USA content.

Other countries have a say about it.

throw1234567891• 2 hours ago

And it’s not a war if Putin says so. And it’s not a possible future invasion of Taiwan if Xi says so. Who cares what US courts say.

MangoCoffee• 2 hours ago

US's court can enforce IPs. Didn't Antrhpic just agree to pay book authors billion for the recent lawsuit settlement?

zuzululu• 2 hours ago

That will never happen. Copyright is not a thing in China.

chmod775• 2 hours ago

The judge explicitly ruled that training on the books was fine.

They just should have bought them, rather than pirating them.

Also LLM output is not IP (in itself) in the first place, nor would Anthropic want to claim it is and that they have rights to it - that would drive paying customers away.

The issue comes down to at most ToS violations.

ctxc3• 2 hours ago

Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books.

What about books and art where the author/artist does not authorise AI to train on it? They do happily train on it, ignoring their "ToS".

This is just double standards, a slap on the wrist to not worsen the situation with authors imo.

You could also say the Chinese companies are doing the same - they _do_ pay for their Anthropic subscriptions after all.

Rebelgecko• 2 hours ago

The settlement doesn't cover the actual training on copy written material

InsideOutSanta• 2 hours ago

Meanwhile, X.ai committing all of the crimes.

1234letshaveatw2• 2 hours ago

did you mean Xi.ai?

aerodexis• 1 hour ago

too bad hypocrisy never got in the way of people making money

tancop• 2 hours ago

[flagged]

yoyohello133• 2 hours ago

Are we not there yet?

kbrisso• 2 hours ago

I think we are pulling in the driveway.

ch4s313• 2 hours ago

US real median household income has been steadily rising[1] for the last 40+ years. Life expectancy is rising again after dipping and plateauing for a few years. Employment numbers are pretty good given the macro headwinds. The US forms ~5.9 million new businesses per year which vastly out paces the EU.

The US isn't without problems, but we're doing OK.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

It's incredible that not a single person replying negatively has included a single piece of data.

realusername• 2 hours ago

It's been pretty clear to me since the first Trump election that it's the end of an era.

hnfong2• 2 hours ago

There's a popular Chinese internet saying: "If you/I are/am not embarrassed, then it's the other person who is embarrassed." (只要我不尴尬，尴尬的就是别人)

SecretDreams2• 2 hours ago

We're maybe only the first half decade into it. Hopefully it doesn't last a century.

scotty79• 2 hours ago

I think we are already quarter of century in. It started with reaction to 9/11 and only got worse since then. Damage was pretty much self-inflicted.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 39 minutes ago

I think it started when the Soviet Union fell apart because we had no global peer or competition and became unserious.

ausbah• 1 hour ago

i feel like we’ve been doing that since 1999

tr45872267• 47 minutes ago

You're reacting to something that didn't happen. Meanwhile China still censors their population and lives under a one party state with a ruler with no term limits.

dang3• 38 minutes ago

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

andai2• 2 hours ago

Don't model weights fall under free speech?

thewebguyd5• 2 hours ago

Yes, in theory, we've been through this rodeo before in the 90s. Bernstein vs. US ruled that source code is expressive speech. It's being challenged though, the court could consider weights as machine data (non-expressive operational artifacts, not human communication).

the US could also pull the functional harm argument in the same way the government uses it to regulate some protected speech (like the whole debacle over DeCSS)

Even if the free speech argument prevails, the US GOV can still use sanctions to prevent the public clouds from hosting any foreign open weight models, and prohibit US based sites from distributing the weights. It'll remain functionally legal for individuals (or at least, unenforceable) but in practice, you'll need to pirate the weights they won't be available from any US based site or provider and would be illegal for businesses to use, even if its a gray area, the liability will mean businesses won't touch them.

smalltorch• 9 minutes ago

Interesting topic for sure.

You could argue encryption is non-expressive operational artifacts too. Any sources on where it's being challenged with this argument?

Because with free speech, you can just create entirely new languages, so who's to say my language isn't weight values?

Also curious how a business would not have grounds to sue on a sanction like this Businesses (in America) have constitutional protections too.

bilbo0s• 2 hours ago

I tell everyone whenever I get a chance, download any open weights models you can as soon as possible.

Buy extra hardrives. Borrow them. Do whatever you have to do.

But to paraphrase Éomer, don't trust to hope, it has abandoned these lands.

3eb7988a1663• 2 hours ago

If there were ever a sign I need to get mirroring, this is it.

What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: <16GB, <32GB, <96, <256, 256+

Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc

throwa3562622• 2 hours ago

It is a lost opportunity that huggingface (or unsloth) frontpage doesn't have a list like this that updates which each model release.

abidlabs2• 2 hours ago

Hugging Face recently added a filter directly on the models page: https://huggingface.co/models that lets you filter based on hardware.

walrus01• 2 hours ago

From the HF front page if you hit "models" it should auto sort by trending before you change any search parameters, so if anything large, capable and popular has just been released it's almost certainly going to be at the top of the list.

commoner2• 2 hours ago

Alibaba Cloud runs ModelScope, which is like Hugging Face but based in China:

- https://modelscope.ai

- Source code (ironically on GitHub): https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope

It's not limited to Alibaba's Qwen. All of the other major Chinese ones are on there (GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi, etc.) as well as finetunes and quantizations of the non-Chinese ones.

abidlabs2• 2 hours ago

Hugging Face recently added a filter directly on the models page: https://huggingface.co/models that lets you filter based on hardware.

ericd• 2 hours ago

My list would be to go grab GLM5.2, Deepseek v4 Flash and Pro, and the various sizes of Qwen 3.5/3.6 dense and MoE, along with at least one of the multi modal qwens (I think it’s called VL). In a pinch, you can quantize them yourself to whatever size you need.

Lord-Jobo• 2 hours ago

Specific use case is way too important for a list like that to be very helpful. I only know image gen well enough to use as an example, but style, resolution, inpainting, img2img or text2image, lora compatibility, etc. all lead to different “best” models.

Even more complex for image2video, but there’s fewer models to choose from there at least.

intrasight2• 60 minutes ago

Sanctions would cancel the whole business rationale for the Chinese government having/supporting open weight models. You can't commoditize your competitors with open-source if your product is blocked.

vunderba• 2 hours ago

The two major image generation models are both by Alibaba - Z-Image and Qwen-Image-2512/Qwen-Edit-2511. They are both decent but have different use-cases. Unfortunately with the recent Qwen-Image 2 and now 3 it doesn't seem likely that they're going to be doing any more open-weight image gen.

https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen-Image-2512

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511

verdverm2• 31 minutes ago

qwen3.6-27B, gemma4-it-31B, poolside/Laguna-S-2.1 are all good text gen models generally in the <128GB (depending on quant, you can fit them in smaller mem footprint)

Note, Laguna provided quants have some issues and they are reworking/updating them.

ninjahawk1• 2 hours ago

The U.S. does NOT have copyright protections on the data that AI models were and are trained on, it was mass theft. Now all of a sudden, the Chinese are stealing from the thieves and we’re supposed to care?

No one cares, we just want cheaper AI models that are equally as powerful. They’re all thieves regardless.

GlickWick12• 2 hours ago

I do care.

It's an unfortunate truth that we're exiting a global peace era and entering one of (hopefully just...) implied conflict. Our biggest geopolitical rival that's been threatening a hot war also distilling the things we build is not a good thing.

Trump is a huge self-own by our electorate sadly, but being concerned about a conflict between China and the US is a very bi-partisan concern for good reason.

Tostino• 2 hours ago

Ask yourself, who seems to be the destabilizing force if you take a step back and look at the state of things objectively?

There is some blame on all sides for sure, not saying it's black and white...but come on.

solumunus2• 2 hours ago

I’m not convinced that it’s a bad thing. What is your actual argument?

guax• 2 hours ago

Might wanna reflect on who’s threatening hot war lately.

mathisfun1232• 2 hours ago

Our biggest geopolitical rival

People on here have zero consistency in their worldviews.

Ask any capitalism zealot (ie hners) whether markets are zero sum and they'll wax poetical about "creating value". But then talk to them about Chinese competition and suddenly everything is a rivalrous good lolol.

I hate to break it to you, your so called rival won this game decades ago when you undercut the working class to make a buck and laundered cheap Chinese labor as productivity. So if you believe the Chinese are rivals um welcome to "reap what you sew" <shrug>.

4wsn2• 2 hours ago

I keep hearing about this "we" as if it's still a coherent nation state and not just an unaccountable ruling class from both parties where the most severe consequence is failing upwards into a lobbyist provided position. I literally have no moral preference when it comes to the US or the CCP nor do I care if the entire nation state fails, let alone loses to a geopolitical rival.

Balinares2• 2 hours ago

I don't think I would characterize this last era as one of global peace.

dgellow2• 2 hours ago

It's an unfortunate truth that we're exiting a global peace era

You’re a tiny bit late on that one

chews• 2 hours ago

Wow, what happened to no holds barred American capitalism? Is it bad when the Chinese somehow do it better? The US stateowning US Steal, Intel, and possibly openai is no different than the Chinese ownership model… and before the US took stakes in the companies they were just bankrolling them as customers SpaceX Oracle etal.

If life is a meritocracy, you gotta give it to the Chinese for their immense growth and improvement of living from agricultural poverty to technical supremacy. I don't want to hear the they stole our IP argument either, because all math is borrowed from something else. Distillation is innovation, in booze and in models.

mywittyname2• 2 hours ago

Luckily for the peace side, the USA's inability to achieve their mission objectives in a war against an adversary that was perceived as being substantially weaker means they are very much less likely to engage in one with a "near peer".

The take away from modern conflicts is that massive military size disparities don't translate into successful invasions anymore.

In other words, it's unlikely USA will pursue a conflict with China, and it's unlikely China will pursue a conflict with Taiwan.

martythemaniak• 2 hours ago

I honestly wonder what world folks like you live in. The US is currently at war, repeatedly threatening several other places and engaged in several costly trade wars. From my Canadian perspective, you are a danger and a menace. China is a commodity supplier. Do the war crimes your country is currently committing not register for you at all? The daily threats, insults, and economic attacks on your 'allies', does that register?

China supports Russia in its war formally, but practically it sells Ukraine whatever it needs, because a weak vassal-like Russia is very much in their interests. The US is far, far more outspoken and active supporter of Russia in this war.

Finally, there will be no hot war with China. They'll likely blockade and invade Taiwan before the end of the decade, but the US will not do anything, partly because it'll be exhausted from it's never ending middle east wars, partly because it'll only take a small bribe to get Trump to back off. He's genuinely fond of dictators like Xi.

Tyrubias2• 1 hour ago

Our biggest geopolitical rival is also the only thing standing in the way of a potential duopoly on LLMs using closed weight models. I would not say I’m a fan of the PRC by any means, but I also do not want to see closed weight models controlled by two big companies dominating what I can use. Especially since said companies arbitrarily restrict model usage and can ban users for no reason.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 hours ago

This is a silly argument. Like yes, obviously it’s of less U.S. concern if one American is robbing another versus a foreign interest. We can deal with one whenever while the other creates constraints.

The better arguments are the ones made in the article. Open weights increase competition and thus AI availability in the U.S. economy.

sscaryterry2• 2 hours ago

Obviously stealing is bad, doesn't matter who you steal from. In this case, its a simple case of no honour amongst thieves.

randbyte• 2 hours ago

Blatantly lack of principles.

wongarsu• 2 hours ago

It's not like those American companies were only stealing form Americans. Maybe you could argue about utility, but morally I don't see any ground to stand on

And the utility argument is also very shaky. The proposed punishment for foreign interests stealing "US data" is that other Americans now aren't allowed to benefit from that, while the rest of the world can

throwfaraway4• 2 hours ago

Whether or not it’s robbery is irrelevant. It’s the proposed remedy that is the problem

myrmidon• 2 hours ago

This is not robbing. Undesired distillation is a ToS violation, at best.

There is not even jurisdiction over Chinese companies, because they don't sell their LLM subscribtions, unlike US companies, and those comitted much more severe violations in getting their training material than a ToS violation or two (Anthropic already found guilty).

edit: I don't see this as legal argument against the ban, more like a justification for why basically no moral person is gonna side with OpenAI and Anthropic on this. US gov can try and ban as many weights as they want, I expect that to be similarly effective as banning numbers was in the past (i.e. not).

mc32• 2 hours ago

One’s like taking something from your brother or sister and the other is like taking from your neighbor with whom you have a bad history…

jchw• 2 hours ago

Its even dumber when you consider AI model output was not considered copyrighted or eligible for copyright to begin with, as far as I know. How exactly would this even be "theft"?

trescenzi• 2 hours ago

Plus on top of that it's been ruled that training on copyrighted material is allowed because it's transformative. As a result even if the model output is copyrighted training on it would be as allowed as training on books.

sroussey5• 2 hours ago

It’s not they, but it does break TOS.

glaslong• 57 minutes ago

I can't imagine Moonshot have found a way to completely bypass the subscription or api billing either. So those model outputs have been paid for! No theft of any kind!

At most they'd be getting more out of distributed use of subsidized plans and API than the ToS would prefer.

cyanydeez• 49 minutes ago

steal from the rich -> theft

steal from the poor -> capitalism

WarmWash4• 2 hours ago

Training on copyright was ruled to be transformative.

Anthropic was just fined for not paying for the pirated books they copied into a training database. Same as anyone else who copied pirated IP onto their hard drive.

However, training an AI on copyright has been ruled to be sufficiently transformative and not a violation of IP laws. The same way you can make a gameplay clone of Call of Duty without any issue.

chalupa-supreme2• 2 hours ago

So they got fined for… stealing?

Also, if I clone Call of Duty, and use their skins, make a similar soundtrack, call my maps the same, then there will definitely be an issue.

I support the use of AI and all, but to hide behind transformative use of copyrighted intellectual property is a discredit to the colossal amount of human work and knowledge that these companies pirated and had their models trained on.

FpUser4• 1 hour ago

"Anthropic was just fined for not paying for the pirated books they copied into a training database."

Normal person would be sitting in jail for doing same thing. It is a shame they call it justice.

Tyrubias2• 1 hour ago

By that same argument, distilling a model to train your own is also transformative. We can’t have it both ways. Either both training on copyright and distillation are transformative, or both are illegal. Also, it is not a matter of settled law that training on copyright is transformative. That was a single case, and others are still pending AFAIK.

supermatt• 1 hour ago

Same as anyone else who copied pirated IP onto their hard drive

Not really the same. Private citizens have received fines MUCH higher per-work when downloading for just their private consumption.

pera• 36 minutes ago

Ruled by whom? The International Court of the Northern District of California?

nekusar5• 2 hours ago

Are public libraries thieves?

Is Anna's Library thieves?

Is Library Genesis thieves?

Is Archive.org thieves?

Is PirateBay thieves?

They all look like public libraries to me. And better access to all human knowledge is a net positive for everyone.

ClumsyPilot5• 2 hours ago

That’s fine too, in that case Open Weight models made by China are doing humanity a favour

sheeshkebab2• 2 hours ago

Someone going to public library, copying every book out of it and then selling them as their own are thieves.

tokai2• 1 hour ago

Public library buy the works they distribute. They also pay for the usage of these works. Copying of said works is still illegal. You should read up on how libraries actually work.

jMyles2• 2 hours ago

The era of so-called "intellectual property" is over.

You can accept it or not. But it's going to be a lot easier if you do.

crote5• 1 hour ago

So how come Disney still gets upset when I provide copies of their movies on my website as "training set for biological neural networks"?

The problem isn't that IP is dying - in most industries it died ages ago. The problem is that it is now explicitly reserved for the rich.

lenerdenator3• 2 hours ago

The answer to widespread theft is not to simply allow the guy who did the theft to get away with it because his implementation was cheaper.

It's to punish theft.

skeeter2020• 1 hour ago

not when by your own rules it's legally ruled "not theft".

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF2• 1 hour ago

Exactly! While the people who spent more money on their theft are rewarded with more business to counteract their losses! Justice is finally being wrought on those who have wronged society with their wicked ways!

(/s if it wasn't obvious)

Being serious, it is far more likely, especially given the events of the past 18 momths, that Trump is just doing autocrat things because he can, and ultimately doesn't really care what is and is not good for American business as long as he continues to grow his wealth through corrupt behavior.

VulgarExigency• 1 hour ago

But distillation is not theft. They are paying for the usage of the API. It is also not copyright infringement, as AI companies do not hold the copyright for the output of their models.

petilon• 1 hour ago

The U.S. does NOT have copyright protections on the data that AI models were and are trained on, it was mass theft.

Absolutely false. Courts have decided that it is fair use [1]. That makes sense. It should not be used to justify Chinese theft.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...

harshalizee• 59 minutes ago

Why is it not fair use for the Chinese models if all they are doing is distilling these fair use models? According to the courts, AI model output is not copyrighted or eligible for copyright.

paulddraper2• 55 minutes ago

Correct. This seems to be poorly understood.

You can use an original work to write an encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). That is fair use.

You cannot copy an original work and distribute it.

LLMs are an encyclopedia.

paulddraper2• 1 hour ago

You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4cxcsa

__MatrixMan__2• 40 minutes ago

dang3• 34 minutes ago

Ok, but can you please follow the HN guidelines and focus on specific, thoughtful discussion, not generic/indignant tangents? The first is what we're trying for, and the second basically destroys it.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ultimately this is more a problem with the upvoting system than the comments themselves, since generic/indignant comments routinely attract lots of upvotes, and then sit on top of the thread, smothering more interesting discussion. But in terms of moderation we can only reply to commenters.

intheitmines• 2 hours ago

How do you ban numbers?

gdiamos2• 2 hours ago

How do you ban melted sand?

wizzzzzy• 2 hours ago

In the same way you can for any digital information?

rkozik1989• 2 hours ago

The same way you ban pirated media from being downloadable on the Internet: not effectively.

thewebguyd5• 2 hours ago

Trade restrictions, sanctions. You can't effectively ban for individuals, but you can make it so legally risky for US based companies that it becomes effectively illegal as no US company will touch them, nor host them.

dualvariable• 33 minutes ago

I'm old enough to remember "this shirt is a munition" and the DeCSS t-shirt.

gdiamos2• 2 hours ago

I think we should shut it off. It would force US companies to build open models.

thewebguyd5• 2 hours ago

US labs would have even less incentive to build open if we blocked foreign open weight models, and we'd be engaging in protectionism yet again, also giving them zero incentive to compete.

preg_match• 1 hour ago

I think it would do the opposite. They would have a monopoly just handed to them, and a large market with no options. They'd have zero incentives to provide open weight models.

Right now, I think their incentive is the highest: Chinese AI companies are dropping competitive models left and right, and clearly American companies are feeling the pressure, given they're pulling every legal leg they can to suppress their competition. If we just remove the competition, Anthropic et al win. It's a temporary and short-sighted victory, but this is America. Every company is short-sighted, it's baked into our financial infrastructure.

formerly_proven• 2 hours ago

Illegal numbers 2: Electric Trumpaloo

nazgulsenpai• 30 minutes ago

Need to print a tshirt with the weights of Kimi 3

aslkalska• 2 hours ago

side note : I wish they had an actual link to the companies instead of just their names in https://littletech.org/membership

npodbielski• 2 hours ago

So Y Combinator signed it too? But this is HN, Y combinator website. I think I am missing something because I never read any opinion like 'we should ban Chinese models'.

Tenoke• 2 hours ago

Y Combinator the company doesnt particularly have to share the opinions of hackernews the public site.

dang3• 36 minutes ago

That's true, and often they diverge. But in this case I think the opinions within YC itself and in the HN community at large are more or less the same - we all want open-weight models.

drbscl• 2 hours ago

OpenAI's strategy lead made a post on X advocating for the banning of Chinese models in the wake of Kimi K3's release.

To be clear, YCombinator et al are advocating for them to remain unbanned.

addandsubtract2• 2 hours ago

They signed the letter to prevent the banning on open-weight models.

officialchicken• 2 hours ago

Why jump to complex technical and policy solutions when an Open Weights AI champion trophy, in solid gold, is being requested by the Commander in Thief?

jgbuddy3• 2 hours ago

The point of open weight models is that this is not possible, companies will be built by taking 'contraband' chinese open weight models and marketing as something from the US

intrasight2• 1 hour ago

Without a massive amount of post-training, it will be obvious that they are Chinese models with Chinese political ideology. I doubt that there's any business model that would work there.

jgbuddy3• 39 minutes ago

I don't think the post-training would be that difficult. I ran an experiment on kimi k3 just now:

User: is taiwan part of china?

Kimi: Taiwan's political status is a complex and contested issue. Here's a balanced overview of the different perspectives: People's Republic of China (PRC) position: The P

<Sorry, I cannot provide this information. Please feel free to ask another question.>

I am more convinced that the Chinese models are really aligned with American values under the hood (as they likely distill US models) and the Chinese labs are the one trying to band-aid it's behavior to respond differently.

theredleft2• 37 minutes ago

do you think that China is some place devoid of business? it's the center of global commerce now. you're gravely mistaken if you think that Chinese models have "Chinese political ideology" baked into them

Grok literally had post work done to make it more right wing and racist.

sheer lunacy

otikik• 2 hours ago

The turntables do their thing.

softwaredoug• 2 hours ago

I see we're doing "too big to fail" again...

jmyeet• 2 hours ago

The US government exists to protect American capital and the interests of capital owners. I'm not sure why people are still confused by this.

This is about OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX. OpenAI, in particular, is a bet on there being a moat for AI and OpenAI "winning". Chinese models threaten this moat. The CCP has decided that it is in China's national security interests to not have Western companies "own" or "win" AI. These AI giants are large enough that the US government is going to intervene to try and protect this outcome. This is a losing battle.

sixdimensional• 2 hours ago

I think that we humans still have a really tough time differentiating and classifying between public and private goods (and everything in between) from an economic sense.

Unfortunately, capitalism of today appears to find public goods and strong, public, healthy public goods to be undesirable investments. Yet, it seems inevitable that some things trend that direction.

I feel if we could get a better handle on what goods fall into which category, and find ways to make those things sustainable and even grow, the situation could get better.

I'm speaking purely from observations here but it also looks like in some ways, the "invisible hand of the economy" (i.e. Adam Smith) might sort these things out by itself, albeit, painfully.

We could look at the fact that LLMs were mostly created from the public domain (except when they were not), and the resulting products/services (expensive to create/operate, benefits a huge swath of humanity, has all kinds of externality issues) as something that perhaps should again almost be considered as a public good.

If we look at the struggles LLM/AI companies have had with legal structure choices, such as nonprofit, for profit, etc and pricing (e.g. do we make it accessible at a loss? Do we extract huge profits?) as a kind of moral dilemma of classifying this new economic good (LLM-based AI).

In the US, the government has been taking investment interests in some tech companies, and recent proposals even include establishing sovereign wealth funds around AI/LLM. I think this is further evidence that the system is trying to figure out how to classify these new economic goods and corporations.

bethekidyouwant• 2 hours ago

“And they warn that banning Americans from downloading Chinese open-weight models wouldn’t stop their proliferation — but would weaken U.S. startups.”

Well this doesn’t even make sense.

krupan• 33 minutes ago

It does because corporations, especially smaller ones competing with bigger ones, actually do get prosecuted for violating restrictions like this a lot more than individuals do.

qlte• 21 minutes ago

Weaken U.S startups = Can’t legally develop commercial products that use or remix the latest open weights models in novel/creative/cost-reducing/etc ways, while companies from the rest of the world could (including China, who this is ostensibly supposed to be punishing)

Wouldn't stop proliferation = Despite that, your non-programmer 14 year old child can still install the latest Qwen model on Day 1 by copying a one liner command they got from a YouTube short that sources from a Gitlab repo outside US jurisdiction

anonbuddy• 2 hours ago

this would actually be big win for non US founders

curious_cat_163• 2 hours ago

exactly. a ban or even any restriction that is "fixed" in time is a bad idea.

The frontier is evolving so fast: any regulatory regime that started with a map of capabilities that 2025 frontier had is obsolete. Same would be true next year. This just becomes a whackamole and a government which is well-meaning and has good reasons to regulate, will have trouble keeping up.

But we know this about regulations. Like there is a century of literature on how to do this for new tech. It always targets harm prevention first. I thought Demis had the right framework for that part. I don't know if I agree fully with a self-regulatory regime because can become problematic if you don't have the right people around the table.

gaws• 2 hours ago

"Nooooo!!! We already laid off half our workforce and got priced out of models from American companies. We need the cheaper models, even risking giving all our data to a foreign adversary, so our big number goes up long enough for us to get acquired!!!"

jMyles2• 1 hour ago

Even more bizarre than debating over whether we can stop the free flow of information across communications surfaces (we can't)... is the notion that this one person - a highly ineffectual occupant of an office whose relevance is rapidly decreasing... is somehow in charge of it.

FpUser4• 1 hour ago

"banning Americans from downloading Chinese open-weight models" - land of free is being even more so

MeteorMarc• 1 hour ago

Would it even be possible to ban open weight models, given all the ways they can be used in finetuned models or online services, also in 3rd countries?

bix6• 1 hour ago

Almost 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator…On Wednesday, the newly-formed Little Tech Association

YC is little tech? lol wut.

Aarostotle• 24 minutes ago

YC's entire business is finding little tech companies and helping them grow.

buellerbueller• 22 minutes ago

It worked for the bolsheviks

robocat• 11 minutes ago

Little Tech Association

"Little Tech" in contrast to "Big Tech" monopolies and hyperscalers

Awful website: ugly particle systems with text you can't scroll to (on SE): https://littletech.org/mission

dolebirchwood• 6 minutes ago

A little bit of Googling goes a long way...

GodelNumbering• 56 minutes ago

Proprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses.

I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.

EMIRELADERO• 32 minutes ago

Proprietary model weights are IP

I don't think they are. Not copyright at least. There may be some "trade secret" stuff for them but they're not copyrightable.

delecti• 28 minutes ago

Trade secrets are a type of IP.

downrightmike• 20 minutes ago

And if an AI generated those wights, they are not copyrightable

sillysaurusx• 11 minutes ago

Proprietary model weights are IP

Not copyrightable IP, or at least it hasn't been challenged yet. I have experience with this: I made llama-dl, a way to download the original llama model. Meta issued a DMCA, I appealed to the HN community for funds, someone funded, and our lawyer successfully counterclaimed. Never heard from Meta again.

A lack of response to the counterclaim doesn't mean the issue is settled. But now there's legal precedent for people pushing back against companies that claim model weights are secret IP and therefore DMCA-able.

stusmall• 7 minutes ago

I can't wrap my head around the idea that distillation is IP theft but mass training on books, music and art without consent is fair use. The two stances are incompatible. If it is transformative use of a book, it is transformative use of AI output.

jmtrevarton• 50 minutes ago

Does this include Deepseek? I don't know if that would crush me, but it would definitely hurt.

culi4• 24 minutes ago

If there's a "ban", it'd only really affect corporations right? It'd be difficult to stop indie devs and pirates from downloading the models

vkaku• 23 minutes ago

Read this thread when you get the time:

https://x.com/_vkaku/status/2080334422231134490

Open Data+Open Models gives everyone else an advantage and bringing regulatory capture here should be appealed and brought to the FTC and the courts to challenge such regulations.

Startups need better than this whole lock down into four overvalued frontier models in the US sort of thing

mmaunder• 3 minutes ago

Not seeing a long thread there. Is that the wrong link?

WillPostForFood• 21 minutes ago

But the idea of a blanket ban on Chinese open-weight models was not seriously discussed.

Article should probably put the above higher in the story.

iugtmkbdfil834• 16 minutes ago

As if making something impossibly difficult to comply with is not defact ban. Case in point: OFAC sanctions waivers. Show me a bank in US that directly deals with those and you will quickly end up with rather interesting representation that mimics current AI situation.

epolanski• 20 minutes ago

What is this socialism about using non-us open weight ai?

Dystopic.

What next? Some communist open source Finnish operating system?

capevace• 8 minutes ago

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?

1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models?

2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway

3. it’s not stopping distillation either, Chinese labs are already banned from using US frontier models and look at how good that is working

I don’t get it. Am I missing something? The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore, and should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return? In any case this would be something benefitting only a very few for a short time (labs + investors).

Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

Matl• 4 minutes ago

Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.
The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

That's the argument.

ThunderBee• 3 minutes ago

You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.

shixinhb• 4 minutes ago

You don't need an archive of huggingface. Instead you can use the Chinese version of huggingface with all Chinese models - https://www.modelscope.ai/models

Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

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