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.
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
commoner 2 hours ago [-]
Alibaba Cloud runs ModelScope, which is like Hugging Face but based in China:
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.
vunderba 1 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.
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.
intrasight 28 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.
commoner 17 minutes ago [-]
Even with US sanctions, Chinese AI companies would continue to serve users in every other country in the world (including China itself), so I don't see why they would stop releasing open weight models.
ericd 1 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.
throwa356262 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.
walrus01 1 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.
abidlabs 1 hours ago [-]
Hugging Face recently added a filter directly on the models page: https://huggingface.co/models that lets you filter based on hardware.
abidlabs 1 hours ago [-]
Hugging Face recently added a filter directly on the models page: https://huggingface.co/models that lets you filter based on hardware.
jgbuddy 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
intrasight 31 minutes 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.
jgbuddy 7 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.
verdverm 3 minutes ago [-]
How are you accessing K3? If it is through Moonshot's API, then there is very likely guardrails, because it seems like it wanted to answer and was then cutoff.
We are starting to get access to K3 from US providers now, curious if they exhibit the same response pattern?
theredleft 4 minutes ago [-]
ask grok about the epstein files. ask gemini about the epstein files. ask them about obama's legacy as a war criminal and the reclassification of civilians as combatants to make drone striking weddings more palatable
unbelievable chauvinism in here
theredleft 5 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
retr0rocket 21 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
tencentshill 2 hours ago [-]
We must all hoard all available models before they get taken down. Is anyone archiving huggingface?
You can just remove the “old.” And view it on the JS invested “New Reddit” without logging in.
MeteorMarc 48 minutes 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?
jmtrevarton 18 minutes ago [-]
Does this include Deepseek? I don't know if that would crush me, but it would definitely hurt.
andai 2 hours ago [-]
Don't model weights fall under free speech?
thewebguyd 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.
sixdimensional 1 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.
> Almost 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator…On Wednesday, the newly-formed Little Tech Association
YC is little tech? lol wut.
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.
softwaredoug 1 hours ago [-]
I see we're doing "too big to fail" again...
tancop 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 6 minutes ago [-]
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
yoyohello13 2 hours ago [-]
Are we not there yet?
hnfong 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)
tantalor 2 hours ago [-]
In English, that is roughly translated to "I've already depicted you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad"
We're maybe only the first half decade into it. Hopefully it doesn't last a century.
realusername 2 hours ago [-]
It's been pretty clear to me since the first Trump election that it's the end of an era.
ch4s3 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.
REAL income is adjusted for inflation. If real median income is increasing then it is outpacing inflation by definition.
senordevnyc 1 hours ago [-]
Why is it that the cynics and doomers always have such a poor grasp of the data?
nixon_why69 48 minutes ago [-]
Because the basket of goods for inflation doesn't separate optional from mandatory consumption.
If housing, healthcare and education are outpacing the topline inflation number, a lot of marginal families will be squeezed. The cheap LG TV doesn't really make up for it.
ch4s3 36 minutes ago [-]
Nevertheless if you lump those costs into an inflation number it won't be a lot higher, the Total Living Cost calculated for 2023-2024 showed 4.4% inflation vs 3% CPI. There are a lot of ways to slice and dice this, which is why people stick to the classic CPI.
nixon_why69 34 minutes ago [-]
Yes, if I ignore that point then the top line number is the same. But it's a choice to compute top line CPI the way they do.
I'm explaining why people are still squeezed despite the top line number saying they shouldn't be.
When data and anecdotes disagree, then double check the way you compile your data.
ch4s3 1 hours ago [-]
I think once you have a good command of data and broader trends its harder to be cynical or a doomer. You just see that things aren't perfect but are larger better than the past on most metrics.
yoyohello13 1 hours ago [-]
I think it's the dissonance between what the data say and just looking around. I see far more homeless, friends and family are more stressed, life in general just feels harder with less opportunity. Then you have the data people saying "no your life is actually great." So why the dissonance? I don't think it's just social media brainwashing.
ch4s3 52 minutes ago [-]
I'm not saying any one person's individual life is necessarily better or worse, just that the median person is doing a little better than a few years ago. obviously there are long tails of outcomes in the US.
I'd also point out that the US has seen better wage growth and less inflation in recent years than the rest of the OECD, by comparison we're doing OK-er than our peers.
sarchertech 50 minutes ago [-]
The reason we have data is because of all the biases that come with “just looking around”. Confirmation bias and selection bias are very powerful.
I strongly dislike Donald Trump, and he has done some terrible things to our country. But my dislike of him also makes me more likely to notice the bad things happening around me.
It happens with conservatives too. Ask my conservative family about how frequently men pretend to be trans and go into women’s bathrooms to get a peek. Ask them how often non-citizens vote. Ask them how the current crime rate compares to when they grew up.
yoyohello13 29 minutes ago [-]
Yeah this seems right to me. Politics is so polarizing it's a guarantee that half the country is going to be pissed no matter who is in charge. Most of my family leans left, it's hard to stay positive when the leader of your country actively and proudly hates you while also making terrible policy decisions.
senordevnyc 1 hours ago [-]
I completely agree, especially if you consider humanity as a whole.
I have asked this question many times to the doomers, and honestly don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good answer: if you had to be born as a random human somewhere on earth, and the only thing you get to choose is the year in which you’re born, what year would you choose? You can’t choose your race, intelligence level, physical abilities, parents, socioeconomic status, country, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Only the year.
So doomers: if the world is completely fucked up and going down the tubes, when would you prefer to have been born? Huge bonus if you can actually give some data showing that the average human was better off during whatever time you choose.
tsimionescu 55 minutes ago [-]
The discussion here was about the USA, not the world.
Balinares 1 hours ago [-]
So many of my people in the US can't even make ends meet anymore that I opened a dedicated line of budget to provide help where I can. It's never been that bad before and it's nowhere near as bad for my people in the EU (not that everything is all rosy there, mind you).
You might argue that Americans are just less capable of supporting themselves but I reject that argument firmly. The situation really reads like systemic causes. And I think cherry picking numbers to convince ourselves otherwise does more harm than good.
Lyngbakr 1 hours ago [-]
But I think there will be a lag. The US has (willingly) forfeited some of its soft power and we may not see the impact of that immediately.
ch4s3 1 hours ago [-]
No argument there. The US has been hit hard by the global populist political wave in recent years.
barbazoo 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe break down those numbers by income and you'll see that rich people are doing fine, everyone else not so much.
ch4s3 1 hours ago [-]
Incomes at the lowest quintile rose 47% from 2021 to 2024. That growth slowed in 2025, but outpaced the growth of higher income quintiles in the first few years post pandemic. Real median household income in 2024 was $83,730 which is the highest it has ever been, and that is the middle quintile.
arjie 25 minutes ago [-]
This one has always made sense to me. If you think about circumstances which improve the bottom quintiles’ relative income so that they’re now making as much as the median (I.e. the curve flattens out through unprecedented prosperity for the poorest) then the middle and upper middle incomes will rightly conclude that they’re not relatively high income anymore.
Placing an arbitrary person on the curve at the right place will show their relative position on this.
There’s a reason a large amount of the complaints are things like “my DoorDash is so much more expensive” and “my insta cart bill is so much higher”.
In the ideal state for the text writing middle and upper middle class, the mostly video consuming lower classes make very little money and provide services for cheap.
One should expect that enriching the poor upsets those whose relative wealth/income is no longer as high as it used to be. I imagine we could test this by comparing p75, p90 to p10 and p50
For my part I am optimistic. So many things today are so much cheaper and better than they used to be. Looking forward to the future - with the one caveat that AI is the precipitous ridge we must walk.
senordevnyc 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe learn what median means?
lowbloodsugar 1 hours ago [-]
More people outside employment than COVID or Great Recession. Inflation wiping out income growth. Family units replaced by multi-job slavery shows up as “improved GDP”. There’s the powerball lottery that one person wins every few weeks and then there’s the crippling medical debt lottery that many people are “winning” every day. Wake up.
ch4s3 1 hours ago [-]
> Inflation wiping out income growth
Real income means inflation adjusted, so we actually see the median income outpacing inflation right now.
> More people outside employment than COVID or Great Recession
There's a lot going on here. One factor is that many people retired early during the pandemic and are going to skew this stat. It's also worth pointing out that the labor force participation rate is ~62% and peaked historically at 67%, so it's not that far off.
> Are you ignorant or propaganda peddler
This is needlessly inflammatory.
lowbloodsugar 1 hours ago [-]
“Inflation adjusted” is offset by the changes to what inflation measures. And again income has only gone up because people are working multiple jobs.
ch4s3 58 minutes ago [-]
The basket of goods is totally transparent and related to things people really buy. Would you want a 2026 inflation number to reference VCR prices?
Only 5.3% of US workers have multiple jobs. The long term average is just above 5%. So it is false to claim more workers have multiple jobs according to BLS stats. This number was above 6% for most of the 1990s.
tokai 46 minutes ago [-]
>Life expectancy is rising again after dipping and plateauing for a few years
Life expectancy dipping for any develop country, even if temporary, is an embarrassing catastrophe.
tr45872267 15 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.
ausbah 39 minutes ago [-]
i feel like we’ve been doing that since 1999
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 7 minutes ago [-]
I think it started when the Soviet Union fell apart because we had no global peer or competition and became unserious.
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?
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'.
drbscl 1 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.
addandsubtract 1 hours ago [-]
They signed the letter to prevent the banning on open-weight models.
Tenoke 1 hours ago [-]
Y Combinator the company doesnt particularly have to share the opinions of hackernews the public site.
dang 4 minutes ago [-]
In this case I think the opinions are more or less the same - we all want open-weight models.
1 hours ago [-]
anonbuddy 1 hours ago [-]
this would actually be big win for non US founders
curious_cat_163 1 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.
intheitmines 2 hours ago [-]
How do you ban numbers?
dualvariable 41 seconds ago [-]
I'm old enough to remember "this shirt is a munition" and the DeCSS t-shirt.
rkozik1989 2 hours ago [-]
The same way you ban pirated media from being downloadable on the Internet: not effectively.
thewebguyd 1 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.
wizzzzzy 2 hours ago [-]
In the same way you can for any digital information?
gdiamos 2 hours ago [-]
How do you ban melted sand?
jMyles 58 minutes 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.
kennywinker 2 hours ago [-]
Under what authority could he block access?
allthetime 2 hours ago [-]
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
root_axis 1 hours ago [-]
Have you been paying attention the last two years? With a few exceptions, he has unilateral authority.
vrganj 38 minutes ago [-]
The "try and stop me" authority of a guy that has armed goons marching down city streets and brutalizing his opposition.
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.
holoduke 2 hours ago [-]
It's the rule based order america is the boss in. Essentially a mafia ruled country where rules are different for opponents.
khurs 2 hours ago [-]
"It's a big club and you aren't in it"
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Catloafdev 2 hours ago [-]
The same authority he used to enact tariffs and a war.
runtime_terror 2 hours ago [-]
So, illegally, got it
gwerbin 2 hours ago [-]
It has the tacit consent of Congress, so it's mostly only illegal in the way it's carried out. Congress could make most of it legal right now, but they don't want to put their names on it. Some of it would probably be unconstitutional for Congress to authorize (ironically via the nondelegation clause which is now being repurposed to justify a thoroughly unconstituational unitary executive arrangement), but much of it would not be, so it's de jure illegal but de facto legal.
nickthegreek 41 minutes ago [-]
If you were to keep using a chinese model after said ban, you would need to be charged with a crime and be found guilty in a court of law for this to be true.
What it would do is have an instant chilling effect across Corporate America, which is the goal.
watwut 56 minutes ago [-]
You just described multiple different ways of being "illegal".
margalabargala 2 hours ago [-]
At a certain level legality is enforcement. If the enforcers of the rules decline to enforce them, you're better off acknowledging what is and dealing with it.
khurs 2 hours ago [-]
and take over Venezuela.
yifanl 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
8note 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
danesparza 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
krapp 2 hours ago [-]
> I wish all Americans were asking thoughtful questions like this. No notes.
Why? We already know Trump often acts without legal authority, and just as often without consequence. Those thoughtful questions have been asked and answered many times, why do we need to ask them again?
danesparza 49 minutes ago [-]
It's the Americans that aren't asking these questions that worry me. It is a significant percentage of the population.
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.
FpUser 55 minutes ago [-]
>"banning Americans from downloading Chinese open-weight models" - land of free is being even more so
otikik 1 hours ago [-]
The turntables do their thing.
2 hours ago [-]
feverzsj 2 hours ago [-]
The only thing Trump can do is building the US version of GFW, which he knows better than anyone else.
formerly_proven 2 hours ago [-]
Illegal numbers 2: Electric Trumpaloo
jmyeet 1 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.
misiti3780 2 hours ago [-]
he cant shut them off anyways, anyone can just VPN to europe and download them
thewebguyd 1 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.
andai 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?
therealdrag0 1 hours ago [-]
I think it means, just because something is accessible doesn’t mean it’s legal, permitted, or okay.
addandsubtract 1 hours ago [-]
The ones at home land on a dinner plate.
2 hours ago [-]
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.
dang 2 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."
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, suffocating the more interesting discussion. But in terms of moderation we can only reply to commenters.
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"?
glaslong 25 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.
trescenzi 1 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.
sroussey 1 hours ago [-]
It’s not they, but it does break TOS.
crote 59 minutes ago [-]
As if scraping the entire internet doesn't break thousands of TOSes?
sroussey 52 minutes ago [-]
Yes, indeed! I have a site where 99% of the traffic is Claude. I could ban them but I don’t bother.
Twirrim 41 minutes ago [-]
I poison their requests with crap, particularly because they were the worst offenders for sheer request rate. The site has maybe a hundred pages, and I'd see them hit at a sustained 20 rps for weeks on end, same content being pulled over and over and over again. Easily handled by my small server as it's static content, but the sheer arrogance (inadvertent or otherwise) pissed me off.
I'm not sure if they caught on, or just finally started behaving better, but after months of being served crap in my never ending labyrinth of auto-generated junk, they have stopped.
sroussey 23 minutes ago [-]
My stuff is on Vercel, so it’s more of an issue as it uses up my limits. I’m moving to Cloudflare and I want to see how changes I make affect their bot, if at all.
SXX 49 minutes ago [-]
Better to feed them poisoned results...
addedGone 36 minutes ago [-]
Scrapping internet realistically does involve Botnets of all kind, the scrapping itself might be legal, but it's certain a ton of infected computers are routing traffic and being used as Proxy.
TacticalCoder 53 minutes ago [-]
It's still the pot calling the kettle black.
cyanydeez 17 minutes ago [-]
steal from the rich -> theft
steal from the poor -> capitalism
WarmWash 1 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-supreme 1 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.
WarmWash 60 minutes ago [-]
>So they got fined for… stealing?
Correct, 2001 napster style pirating of content. You cannot copy stuff you didn't pay for onto your hard drive.
>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.
A gameplay clone as I stated, tons exist (team death match, capture the flag, battle royale, with first person gunplay and army guys shooting each other). The rest is your argument, not mine.
chalupa-supreme 35 minutes ago [-]
I don’t think I’d equate a corporation downloading TBs of copyrighted works (with the intent of making a profit on stealing copyrighted works) and John downloading a few GBs of MP3s for personal consumption.
WarmWash 10 minutes ago [-]
Probably why John wasn't ordered to pay $1.5B.
sznio 1 hours ago [-]
yep, theft but not plagiarism.
spwa4 1 hours ago [-]
Theft would give the victim a one-time payment, plagiarism would have given the victims payments every time the model was used. In other words: IP stealing through training LLMs is declared 100% legal.
The question is what happens when somebody mass-"uncopyrights" entire libraries of content for the first time. Because, of course, this judgement should have sent the stock price of Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros, New York Times ... to zero.
Why? Because at this point these companies are living on borrowed time. Courts have outlined a clear, legal, process to "uncopyright" any given work.
jnovek 29 minutes ago [-]
If I make Bambi 2 and toss it up on YouTube I’m going to be sued by Disney for a wide variety of intellectual property violations, it doesn’t matter if I make it by hand or via an LLM. Nothing has changed for big organizations with a legal team.
pera 4 minutes ago [-]
Ruled by whom? The International Court of the Northern District of California?
Tyrubias 50 minutes 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 40 minutes 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.
FpUser 53 minutes 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.
__MatrixMan__ 8 minutes ago [-]
Copyright infringement, maybe. Theft? No. When something is stolen from you, you don't have that thing anymore.
petilon 29 minutes 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.
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.
paulddraper 23 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.
JumpCrisscross 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.
myrmidon 1 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).
nickthegreek 59 minutes ago [-]
> 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).
This is false. They do sell LLM subscriptions. Many also release _most_ of their models as open weights.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
None of it is robbing because there is no violence, but sure. The point is being confused why an external threat is treated differently from internal ones is a self goal in a debate where there are far better arguments for not banning these models.
wongarsu 1 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
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
There isn’t an argument for banning Chinese or open-weight models. I’m just saying OP’s moralistic outrage take is about the weakest one you can come up with against it.
sscaryterry 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.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> its a simple case of no honour amongst thieves
Which is why making an honour-based argument to said thieves is silly.
throwfaraway4 1 hours ago [-]
Whether or not it’s robbery is irrelevant. It’s the proposed remedy that is the problem
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
Sure. Great. OP’s argument focuses on the outrage. That’s focusing on the first bit.
randbyte 1 hours ago [-]
Blatantly lack of principles.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
Sure. The American electorate isn’t really principled right now. If the best argument we can surface is this tripe, we’ll lose access.
paulddraper 29 minutes ago [-]
You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!
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.
VulgarExigency 34 minutes 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.
skeeter2020 53 minutes ago [-]
not when by your own rules it's legally ruled "not theft".
lenerdenator 47 minutes ago [-]
Rules are flexible. The people who pay attention know this.
People expect the US to apply rules evenly to both American AI efforts and that of its primary geopolitical rival. China certainly doesn't do that. Their entire economy is based around giving Chinese firms the advantage regardless of what it means for the wallets of consumers at home or abroad.
Since that's who we're playing against, and no one is going to willingly give up their open-weight models from the totalitarian rival, well, then use their ruleset.
It's that or punish the theft by making the US companies pay for their training data and blocking outside efforts that trained off the data the US companies stole.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 50 minutes 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.
nekusar 1 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.
46 minutes ago [-]
sheeshkebab 1 hours ago [-]
Someone going to public library, copying every book out of it and then selling them as their own are thieves.
__MatrixMan__ 4 minutes ago [-]
No, they've merely infringed copyright. Theft is a well understood concept and it does not pertain to information.
RiverCrochet 7 minutes ago [-]
Not technically theft unless the public library no longer has the books. Selling something and saying you created it when you didn't is a different five-letter word: fraud.
Putting prompts in an LLM and saying you "created" the image or text thereof is fraud.
sscaryterry 1 hours ago [-]
I don't believe anything is being sold here :)
sheeshkebab 1 hours ago [-]
Barrels of tokens sold by thieves that copied every book sure looks like selling to me.
runarberg 59 minutes ago [-]
AI companies sell access to their models, via subscriptions and ads.
Public libraries don‘t sell anything. Also authors and publishers get payed for having their books in the library (how and how much varies by country). Authors and publishers get nothing for having their books put into AI training data. Hence the former is a public service, and the latter is theft.
56 minutes ago [-]
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 39 minutes ago [-]
Okay, but that's not what happened as far as I'm aware. Who did they sell their copies of the books to?
tokai 48 minutes 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.
stanac 20 minutes ago [-]
> Copying of said works is still illegal.
Yes it is, but at least they are not charging for the access.
nekusar 36 minutes ago [-]
That's NOT always been the case.
Libraries used to require membership and dues. Those then bought more books on the used or retail market. LOTS of fights were about that system, cause book publishers hated libraries. And well, they still do.
And to be fair, fuck copyright. Its holds all of us back, so someone can go "FUCK YOU, NO". And nobody or company deserves what is it, 70 years+ death copyright length.
And with the recent Anthropic settlement, used to be, for-profit pirates would go to prison. I also remember absurd 2000's settlements over Britney Spears and Metallica for $5000-$7000 for 20 songs.
You are not going to win me over on massive gatekeeping human knowledge over "Itssss ill-eagle!". I know, and I don't care. And if I'm ever in a case over this, I'll tank it.
ClumsyPilot 1 hours ago [-]
That’s fine too, in that case Open Weight models made by China are doing humanity a favour
nekusar 58 minutes ago [-]
I strongly believe that's the case. That's even the case with the recent OpenAI hack of HuggingFace.
The censorship of US models is so bad (read: guardrails), that they had to use GLM 5.2 on their own hardware to do the analysis. That's how locked down, restrictive, and closed source American models are. They're basically for-profit piracy by way of selling tokens.
Whereas the Chinese models are just "here you go, download and run".
I know what I run. Qwen3.5 and 3.6 and GLM5.2 . USA token vendors are incentivised in doing worse to sell more slot machine tokens.
jMyles 1 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.
crote 54 minutes 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.
warkdarrior 44 minutes ago [-]
The solution is straightforward -- be rich!
ai_fry_ur_brain 22 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
1234letshaveatw 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
diego_sandoval 55 minutes ago [-]
You can be against both.
mc32 1 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…
GlickWick 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.
mywittyname 1 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.
mlinhares 58 minutes ago [-]
Yes, the administration is definitely and would not start a war for no reason other than to start a war.
People really have to stop sanewashing the government, it doesn't work anymore, these people are not thinking through what they're doing.
sroussey 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t think those are “learned” lessons. Only how to push harder next time.
guax 1 hours ago [-]
Might wanna reflect on who’s threatening hot war lately.
dghlsakjg 1 hours ago [-]
It's not a threat anymore if you actually start a war!
/s
GlickWick 1 hours ago [-]
The main actors threatening (and delivering) a hot war are China, and by proxy, Russia. The Ukraine war is absolutely and transparently enabled by China, who is also trying to actively destabilize the EU and the US in order to make its conquest of Taiwan more likely.
Yes, the US has an idiot in charge who is threatening these things in response, too. However, unlike China, the electorate does not support him. His election is also almost certainly due to aggressive campaigns to destabilize the US internally for this exact purpose.
dgellow 1 hours ago [-]
The US isn’t just _threatening_, it is in an open war right now, invaded Venezuela, started trade war with US allies
encom 51 minutes ago [-]
>invaded Venezuela
Didn't happen. An intervention happened. An invasion lasts more than two hours.
stanleykm 1 hours ago [-]
Sorry who is China threatening a hot war with? As far as I can tell the US is doing most of the warring these days…
GlickWick 1 hours ago [-]
Taiwan, while simultaneously preparing an invasion fleet trained to stop US and EU attempts at a rescue.
ClumsyPilot 38 minutes ago [-]
I think you have a typo, did you mean to write Cuba?
I think this Chinese invasion fleet is lost and it accidentally blockaded tiny country of Cuba instead of Taiwan, they are blocking EU attempts at a rescue and children die in hospitals because there is no fuel and no power.
Terrible navigational error
1 hours ago [-]
FpUser 42 minutes ago [-]
Count wars, invasions and simply messing with other countries by the US starting since the end of WWII and then come back. Your post is a pile of BS
ClumsyPilot 48 minutes ago [-]
> The main actors threatening (and delivering) a hot war are China
China is actually the adult in the room and your are a victim of propaganda.
Since 1979, 45 years ago, China has not dropped a single bomb on foreign land. That’s two generations peace.
In that timeframe, USA has attacked 37 countries, France 22, Britain 10, and Italy has attacked 6.
What determines if a country is a threat? Simple test - would they arrest Eipstein and execute him?
More politically correct phrasing - “do they respect American economic elites.” ?
If the answer is no, the country is ‘a threat to the west’
You don’t believe me? Name 2 countries that don’t fit this model.
And if you disagree with the way they run their country, and that makes them a threat.
Then it seems you a problem with the concept of an independent country.
Tyrubias 45 minutes 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.
dgellow 1 hours ago [-]
> It's an unfortunate truth that we're exiting a global peace era
You’re a tiny bit late on that one
GlickWick 1 hours ago [-]
No, we are in the process of an exit. This takes time
ClumsyPilot 34 minutes ago [-]
Does this sentence have any meaning at all?
There are 30 Active military conflicts right now.
4wsn 1 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.
dataflow 1 hours ago [-]
> nor do I care if the entire nation state fails
You should care because of the nukes, if nothing else.
crote 50 minutes ago [-]
Are we even sure they still work? The last test was 34 years ago, after all.
For all we know some crafty contractors or NCOs have been making very good money off of selling "spare" parts - just like we saw when Russia first tried to invade Ukraine...
ClumsyPilot 32 minutes ago [-]
Nukes are the only thing keeping corrupt ruling class and their ambitions in check.
As eipstein proved, it definitely ain’t morals
mywittyname 1 hours ago [-]
> both parties
I'm sorry, but only one "party" is comprised of fascist plutocrats speed-running the end of democracy in the USA.
The USA and world would be a vastly different place had a different party maintained power in the USA 10 years ago.
runarberg 55 minutes ago [-]
As I see it, one party is comprised of fascist plutocrats, and the other party is comprised of their enablers. In dictatorships the latter is called controlled opposition, I don‘t know what the latter is called in a democracy, but in absence of a better word “both parties” gets the meaning across IMO.
Balinares 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think I would characterize this last era as one of global peace.
2 hours ago [-]
solumunus 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not convinced that it’s a bad thing. What is your actual argument?
GlickWick 2 hours ago [-]
My argument is that a major world power is pushing towards global conflict by simultaneously funding the conquest of Ukraine while building its own invasion fleet for Taiwan. Allowing them to also destabilize us internally is not exactly a good idea.
mikem170 45 minutes ago [-]
> funding the conquest of Ukraine
It is well known that China is still engaged in trade with Russia- oil and gold going one way, drones and weapon components going the other.
But you said funding, and I assume you meant things like grants or loans. Do you have any sources for that? I could only find one that was attributed to indirect open source intelligence, nothing specific.
SecretDreams 1 hours ago [-]
I thought you were talking about the US for a minute...
GlickWick 1 hours ago [-]
The US is building a Taiwan invasion fleet?
tsimionescu 1 hours ago [-]
No, the US is actively invading Iran, by ship and by air. And they've invaded Venezuela. And they're actively supporting Israel's invasion of Lebanon and Gaza. And they're bombing a few more countries now and then, especially in Africa.
China is not actively involved in any war at all. They may be supporting Russia with resources, but it's nowhere near the level of material and diplomatic support that the USA is providing to Israel's genocide and war of aggression on Lebanon.
solumunus 1 hours ago [-]
How is it destabilising? Do you purely mean China have exposed ill thought out investments? That’s capitalism my guy. The market is working as intended.
When the investments fail there will be volatility but it’s hardly existential for the US. Open models are good for the whole world, I would argue it’s a net positive for individuals.
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.
johnsmith1840 34 minutes ago [-]
Almost all current world events as of now are directly tied to the fact that the west is in active freakout mode over china building a army large enough to attack the entire world. Iran and venuzuela are a direct response to it.
1. China is actively genociding an entire ethnic people.
2. They are actively building a military larger and faster than any country on earth in all of history.
3. They are actively threatening ALL of their neighbors with war. Actively attacking their ships and building military bases in other countries territory.
4. China's open stated goals are to conquer and control its neighbors and every single step over the last 10 years is proof of that.
GlickWick 2 hours ago [-]
I think the major destabilizing force is the country that has been building the infrastructure for a hot war over Taiwan for the last decade while simultaneously blatantly funding the conquest of Ukraine.
The US stupidly withdrawing from the world stage is definitely making this worse, of course, but it is not the catalyst. It's unfortunately a very likely side effect of a social media campaign by the same actor to make said hot war easier to win.
henry2023 1 hours ago [-]
Hey, we started another war and are funding the most destabilizing force in the world but look at this theoretical war …
4wsn 1 hours ago [-]
It's literally on their border and the history is akin to if The South established its own nation state in Cuba after the Civil War and China became its ally.
At least admit the double standard. I don't mind realpolitik but it's so tedious when it's not plainly stated and there's this veneer of civility.
Yes, the US is allowed to do whatever it wants to in South America. No, other nation states don't have a sphere of geographic influence if the US doesn't want them to.
stickfigure 41 minutes ago [-]
Taiwan has been self governing for longer than almost everyone that lives there has been alive. It's also a vibrant democracy.
If you care about democracy and human rights, it's morally reprehensible NOT to support Taiwan. We can debate the ethics of intervening in strongman dictatorships like Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran, but Taiwan is clear.
duplessitous 1 hours ago [-]
Despite withdrawing from our role on the world stage, we have in no way adapted isolationist like policies. We kidnapped the leader of another country, we are bombing Iran with impunity and will begin striking civilian infrastructure as a response to terrorist within that country, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/07/22/trum...
China didn't make us do this any more than they made us bomb civilian fishing boats in South America. We are a major destabilizing force at the moment, China existing does not somehow negate the actions we take of our own free will.
Refusing to acknowledge our role in destabilizing the globe at the moment is a level of infantilization that I, and many others, find unacceptable. We are all adults, China is responsible for their role and the US is responsible for its role. A social media campaign is not forcing the folks in Washington to drop bombs on Iranian civilian infrastructure, the jack asses in Washington did all of this on their own
GlickWick 1 hours ago [-]
Nobody is refusing to acknowledge our role in destabilizing things. This is a thread about why the US might be afraid of an also bad-actor rival funding a huge proxy war against it controlling major technology.
duplessitous 51 minutes ago [-]
I mean if you want to get back on the topic of this thread, it has nothing to do with what you just said. The thread started by discussing AI distillation and this was your initial comment, just to get us back on track
> Our biggest geopolitical rival that's been threatening a hot war also distilling the things we build is not a good thing
They didn't distill Fable, it is impossible on any timeline. So where do we go next, the start of this thread is a complete dead-end as it is asserting a falsehood
This was the comment i responded to so we can get back on track to that comment if you'd like
> I think the major destabilizing force is the country that has been building the infrastructure for a hot war over Taiwan for the last decade while simultaneously blatantly funding the conquest of Ukraine.
We are refusing to aid Ukraine and actively antagonize their leader. We are kidnapping leaders from other countries. We are bombing civilian infrastructure. We are the major destabilizing force, not the one planning a hypothetical invasion
p-e-w 1 hours ago [-]
In the decade during which you claim China has been preparing for a hot war, the United States invaded multiple countries and waged hot wars on three continents.
It’s ridiculous to compare China to the US when it comes to warmongering. They’re not even in the same ballpark.
GlickWick 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the US is not an incredible actor, but China is funding the most brutal war in modern history (the invasion of Ukraine) in order to provide a smokescreen for their own invasion.
tsimionescu 1 hours ago [-]
The Ukraine war is large and terrible, but its nowhere near comparable in brutality to the genocide in Gaza, that the US is funding, providing weapons for, and protecting diplomatically.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> who seems to be the destabilizing force if you take a step back and look at the state of things objectively?
All of them. Pretending there is a benevolent bully among Russia, China and America is baseless.
This is probably the strongest moral argument for open-weight models. It decouples AI, somewhat, from military-industrial might.
barbazoo 1 hours ago [-]
This is proof the US propaganda is working. How much damage has China done recently militarily?
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> This is proof the US propaganda is working
This is a thought-terminating cliche. (The folks telling you to stop being sheeple are unusually consistently claimed independent thinkers.)
> How much damage has China done recently militarily?
Exempting the Iran war, which has no justification, as much as America. We’re both backing proxies. (Though we’ve had a while since we shot at or annexed our neighbours.)
advael 58 minutes ago [-]
It seems pretty silly to answer a question about military intervention by insisting that the major instance of military intervention by a world power that's happened in the last year shouldn't be counted
JumpCrisscross 43 minutes ago [-]
> by insisting that the major instance of military intervention by a world power that's happened in the last year shouldn't be counted
I’m not. I’m saying exempting that, we have an even field of conflict mongering. Counting Iran, the field is biased, but we have significant sampling-timing issues for something like “is there war.”
China has violently annexed sovereign countries in the past decades. Its threats to do the same again are at least as serious as Trump’s Greenland nonsense. There can be more than one baddie.
nixon_why69 37 minutes ago [-]
Iraq war? Venezuela raid? Libya? Syria? Afghanistan for 20 years? And that's just some of the higher visibility cases.
If China had special forces deployed and conducting ops in random African countries it would be a massive aggression. When we do it, it doesn't even make the headlines.
JumpCrisscross 35 minutes ago [-]
> If China had special forces deployed and conducting ops in random African countries it would be a massive aggression
It’s literally doing this across its maritime and mountain boundaries! It does cause outrage, albeit less so in mass media.
barbazoo 26 minutes ago [-]
What's a good example you would say?
JumpCrisscross 7 minutes ago [-]
I’d say the South China Sea island building in violation of UNCLOS text and judgement comes pretty close to American CIA-style fuckery in South America and Africa.
To be clear, American fuckery is broader. But if we agree we’re discussing magnitudes and not kind, we agree on all I’m arguing.
nixon_why69 17 minutes ago [-]
I think they're referring to occasional fist fights between the Indian and Chinese deployments at the top of the Himalayas where there's a dumb territorial dispute. There were a couple of times decades ago where the forces shot at each other and the governments had to scramble to calm things down and deescalate, so somehow they've reached this gentleman's agreement to have fistfights instead.
We're talking about this kind of thing balancing out, say, Fallujah or shock and awe over Baghdad.
JumpCrisscross 6 minutes ago [-]
> We're talking about this kind of thing balancing out, say, Fallujah or shock and awe over Baghdad
Nonsense. For that comparison you’d look to the invasion and annexation of Tibet. (And it’s not ancient history if it’s currently endorsed and un-apologized for.)
nixon_why69 29 seconds ago [-]
Ok, then we expand the US horizon back to the 50s as well. We've added Tibet, and the 1979 3 week Vietnam war to the Chinese column, plus them being involved in the Korean war and to a lesser degree the American Vietnam War. This comes with way, way more added to the American column. At least it's no longer a shutout.
Any fair look at both countries' records puts the US as doing 10-100x more military intervention, on a global rather than regional scale.
FpUser 28 minutes ago [-]
>"China has violently annexed sovereign countries in the past decades."
An outright lie. The only possible candidate is Tibet but it's former sovereignty is very questionable and not clear cut
JumpCrisscross 55 seconds ago [-]
> it's former sovereignty is very questionable and not clear cut
Same as Taliban-run Afghanistan, same as Iraq, same as Ukraine, same as Taiwan.
Calling the territory you’re invading and/or annexing illegitimately independent, illegitimately governed is how these always go.
martythemaniak 1 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.
sroussey 57 minutes ago [-]
Or… war with China is inevitable if only to keep the gap in military capabilities. There is a thinking to mow down their military while we still can in some circles. Like those in power currently. Scary.
chews 1 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.
1234letshaveatw 1 hours ago [-]
"what happened to no holds barred American capitalism?" you mean the strawman that never existed?
mathisfun123 1 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>.
GlickWick 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not the "hive mind" of HN or whatever. Individuals hold unique opinions.
Yes, China is a rival. No, they have not won. Their economy is in a lot of trouble, likely far worse than the shape of the US's currently. That situation may accelerate a hot war though, as has historically been the case globally.
tsimionescu 1 hours ago [-]
People have been claiming this since the 2000s. There are Economist articles from 2005 predicting an imminent collapse of China's economy. China has only grown more rapidly since then.
stanleykm 1 hours ago [-]
You need to stop watching those “China is gonna collapse any minute now…” youtube videos
GlickWick 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t. I do read major reputed economists though, and they are not exactly bullish on China.
Don’t create fictional versions of the people you argue with. This is the second time in a span of 10 minutes that you’ve done it. It completely undermines any attempt to discuss something, and drops your integrity to zero.
drdexebtjl 54 minutes ago [-]
Are any of those major reputed economists Russian or Chinese by any chance?
Or are they just Western economists repeating Western bias under a veil of objectivity?
I’m sorry but this is a perfect example of what the person above criticized but in reverse. Come on now.
China’s youth unemployment rate is 15%, and that’s likely heavily astroturfed to look lower than it is. Even 15% though is terrifying for a mature economy.
crote 24 minutes ago [-]
You know who should be terrified by that rate? Us.
China's one-child policy is finally starting to hit, and its population is actively shrinking. At the moment China is not in a crisis yet, as its GDP is still growing quite well - so clearly there's plenty of economic activity.
So if a lot of old people are now retiring, and the young can't find jobs, who is doing the work? China is still a factory powerhouse, so who's screwing together the gadgets?
The answer is that they have been pushing heavily for automation, and it is working. Our biggest chance of beating China on a free market was domestic automation versus cheap overseas labor - but they have gotten there first. And that should be absolutely terrifying you.
drdexebtjl 51 minutes ago [-]
It doesn’t sound like their society or their economy is collapsing.
Like ours would if we had 15% youth unemployment.
Maybe we’re projecting our values?
nekusar 51 minutes ago [-]
The USA has sold its tech base off to enshittifiers. They defunded and destroyed most critical tech research.
China leads in 66 of 74 critical tech areas. The USA has a whopping... 8.
But hey, the USA's MBA "leadership" figures how much to worsen everything and extract more profit. I guess that counts for "innovation", in the Private Equity books.
crote 37 minutes ago [-]
China is only getting stronger. They have captured basically the entire electronics industry - except a handful of cutting-edge chips. They have captured the solar panel industry. They are significantly outperforming the traditional brands when it comes to all kinds of BEVs.
In all the ways that matter, China is rapidly racing towards or even past the West. We've been pretending that it is possible to remain relevant on the world stage while only offering services and a handful of luxury goods. A China without the West would be a painful transition, but the West without China? A massacre.
China hasn't won yet primarily because the West hasn't even figured out it is in a competition. We're getting our asses kicked and don't even realize it yet! Worst of all? The Western capitalists created China, all for a few cents of shareholder value...
mathisfun123 1 hours ago [-]
> Their economy is in a lot of trouble, likely far worse than the shape of the US's currently
Source: trust me bro
eggy 38 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
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).
hnfong 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.
2 hours ago [-]
dragontamer 2 hours ago [-]
Because they used a pirating website to get the material and stored them on their servers for personal use.
The AI training part of the court case was deemed fair use.
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.
InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, X.ai committing all of the crimes.
1234letshaveatw 1 hours ago [-]
did you mean Xi.ai?
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?
ctxc 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.
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
>Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books.
No, it was asked to pay book authors because it pirated copies of books and stored them on their hard drives. The ruling had nothing to do with training.
ctxc 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks - I didn't verify this personally, but still stand corrected.
If training wasn't considered outside the law, this goes on to make the point about double standards for US vs Chinese model training methods.
adrr 1 hours ago [-]
Pirating millions of dollars worth of books would land people in jail. Government went after Aaron Scwartz for "pirating" scientific journals.
bloppe 43 minutes ago [-]
Aaron Schwartz was re-publishing the journals, which is the core concern or copyright and indeed where the word "copyright" comes from. Anthropic could get in a lot more trouble if their models are caught reproducing copyrighted work from their training set wholesale.
I think the Aaron Schwartz case is incredibly vexing because he was obviously acting out of a sense of altruism without personal self-interest. I don't think he deserved the book getting thrown at him like that. But the whole copyright system, which people seem to think is simultaneously good and bad, kinda rests on not allowing those kinds of violations
NicuCalcea 9 minutes ago [-]
I've linked this several times, but LLMs are capable of reproducing entire books. Researchers were able to extract books nearly verbatim: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
ctxc 1 hours ago [-]
I didn't think about this parallel, but that's just so sad.
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.
nickthegreek 54 minutes ago [-]
> They just should have bought them, rather than pirating them.
Bought, scanned and destroyed them I believe. The judge okay'd Destructive Scanning.
bloppe 31 minutes ago [-]
Destruction is not necessary. Google Books is a solid precedent. You can keep the content, you just can't make significant parts publicly available
nickthegreek 16 minutes ago [-]
> The court also held that the third factor favored fair use as to the purchased library copies converted from print to digital because the purpose of the copying was to keep the books in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. This purpose required copying, there was no surplus copying and the source copy was destroyed. With respect to the pirated copies, however, the court held that because “Anthropic lacked any entitlement to hold those copies” and retained them “even after deciding it would not make further copies from them for training,” this third factor weighed against Anthropic for that particular use.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. Instead, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. More formatting info here.*
SubiculumCode 56 minutes ago [-]
fixed.
b112 41 minutes ago [-]
I vouched, not sure it will help.
functionmouse 2 hours ago [-]
he could order possession of it treason and punishable similarly to other illegal numbers.
bakies 2 hours ago [-]
no he can't, he doesnt make laws
amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago [-]
Legality doesn't seem to have much effect, in his case.
tensegrist 2 hours ago [-]
executive orders?
thewebguyd 20 minutes ago [-]
A president cannot (legally) use an EO to create new laws that bind private citizens or businesses. EOs can only be issued to federal agencies, and only Federal Agencies & Employees (and federal contractors) are bound by direct compliance of an EO.
Now that Chevron is no more, EOs are even weaker than they used to be because the regulatory agencies no longer have teeth.
Premature compliance != legally required compliance. Anyone complying early to an EO when they don't have to is an idiot.
bakies 47 minutes ago [-]
The executive can't enforce laws that don't exist
AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, he can do executive orders. The courts still get to judge whether they are legal, though... some months/years later.
For the more egregious ones, there are temporary restraining orders... days/weeks/months later.
So, yes, he can do that, and yes, he can be overruled on them, and yes, that happens after some damage has already been done.
bethekidyouwant 1 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 50 seconds 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.
gaws 1 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!!!"
gdiamos 2 hours ago [-]
I think we should shut it off. It would force US companies to build open models.
preg_match 50 minutes 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.
thewebguyd 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.
Rendered at 17:23:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: <16GB, <32GB, <96, <256, 256+
Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc
- 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.
https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo
https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen-Image-2512
https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511
Even more complex for image2video, but there’s fewer models to choose from there at least.
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.
We are starting to get access to K3 from US providers now, curious if they exhibit the same response pattern?
unbelievable chauvinism in here
Grok literally had post work done to make it more right wing and racist.
sheer lunacy
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder
https://safereddit.com/r/datahoarder
Instances:
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
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.
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.
YC is little tech? lol wut.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/depicted-as-a-soyjak
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.
Compare it to the Consumer Price Index:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R
If housing, healthcare and education are outpacing the topline inflation number, a lot of marginal families will be squeezed. The cheap LG TV doesn't really make up for it.
I'm explaining why people are still squeezed despite the top line number saying they shouldn't be.
When data and anecdotes disagree, then double check the way you compile your data.
I'd also point out that the US has seen better wage growth and less inflation in recent years than the rest of the OECD, by comparison we're doing OK-er than our peers.
I strongly dislike Donald Trump, and he has done some terrible things to our country. But my dislike of him also makes me more likely to notice the bad things happening around me.
It happens with conservatives too. Ask my conservative family about how frequently men pretend to be trans and go into women’s bathrooms to get a peek. Ask them how often non-citizens vote. Ask them how the current crime rate compares to when they grew up.
I have asked this question many times to the doomers, and honestly don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good answer: if you had to be born as a random human somewhere on earth, and the only thing you get to choose is the year in which you’re born, what year would you choose? You can’t choose your race, intelligence level, physical abilities, parents, socioeconomic status, country, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Only the year.
So doomers: if the world is completely fucked up and going down the tubes, when would you prefer to have been born? Huge bonus if you can actually give some data showing that the average human was better off during whatever time you choose.
You might argue that Americans are just less capable of supporting themselves but I reject that argument firmly. The situation really reads like systemic causes. And I think cherry picking numbers to convince ourselves otherwise does more harm than good.
Placing an arbitrary person on the curve at the right place will show their relative position on this.
There’s a reason a large amount of the complaints are things like “my DoorDash is so much more expensive” and “my insta cart bill is so much higher”.
In the ideal state for the text writing middle and upper middle class, the mostly video consuming lower classes make very little money and provide services for cheap.
One should expect that enriching the poor upsets those whose relative wealth/income is no longer as high as it used to be. I imagine we could test this by comparing p75, p90 to p10 and p50
For my part I am optimistic. So many things today are so much cheaper and better than they used to be. Looking forward to the future - with the one caveat that AI is the precipitous ridge we must walk.
Real income means inflation adjusted, so we actually see the median income outpacing inflation right now.
> More people outside employment than COVID or Great Recession
There's a lot going on here. One factor is that many people retired early during the pandemic and are going to skew this stat. It's also worth pointing out that the labor force participation rate is ~62% and peaked historically at 67%, so it's not that far off.
> Are you ignorant or propaganda peddler
This is needlessly inflammatory.
Only 5.3% of US workers have multiple jobs. The long term average is just above 5%. So it is false to claim more workers have multiple jobs according to BLS stats. This number was above 6% for most of the 1990s.
Life expectancy dipping for any develop country, even if temporary, is an embarrassing catastrophe.
To be clear, YCombinator et al are advocating for them to remain unbanned.
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.
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.
What it would do is have an instant chilling effect across Corporate America, which is the goal.
Why? We already know Trump often acts without legal authority, and just as often without consequence. Those thoughtful questions have been asked and answered many times, why do we need to ask them again?
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.
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.
Do you have many ducks at home?
No one cares, we just want cheaper AI models that are equally as powerful. They’re all thieves regardless.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
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, suffocating the more interesting discussion. But in terms of moderation we can only reply to commenters.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
At most they'd be getting more out of distributed use of subsidized plans and API than the ToS would prefer.
I'm not sure if they caught on, or just finally started behaving better, but after months of being served crap in my never ending labyrinth of auto-generated junk, they have stopped.
steal from the poor -> capitalism
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.
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.
Correct, 2001 napster style pirating of content. You cannot copy stuff you didn't pay for onto your hard drive.
>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.
A gameplay clone as I stated, tons exist (team death match, capture the flag, battle royale, with first person gunplay and army guys shooting each other). The rest is your argument, not mine.
The question is what happens when somebody mass-"uncopyrights" entire libraries of content for the first time. Because, of course, this judgement should have sent the stock price of Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros, New York Times ... to zero.
Why? Because at this point these companies are living on borrowed time. Courts have outlined a clear, legal, process to "uncopyright" any given work.
Not really the same. Private citizens have received fines MUCH higher per-work when downloading for just their private consumption.
Normal person would be sitting in jail for doing same thing. It is a shame they call it justice.
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...
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.
The better arguments are the ones made in the article. Open weights increase competition and thus AI availability in the U.S. economy.
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).
This is false. They do sell LLM subscriptions. Many also release _most_ of their models as open weights.
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
Which is why making an honour-based argument to said thieves is silly.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4cxcsa
It's to punish theft.
People expect the US to apply rules evenly to both American AI efforts and that of its primary geopolitical rival. China certainly doesn't do that. Their entire economy is based around giving Chinese firms the advantage regardless of what it means for the wallets of consumers at home or abroad.
Since that's who we're playing against, and no one is going to willingly give up their open-weight models from the totalitarian rival, well, then use their ruleset.
It's that or punish the theft by making the US companies pay for their training data and blocking outside efforts that trained off the data the US companies stole.
(/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.
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.
Putting prompts in an LLM and saying you "created" the image or text thereof is fraud.
Public libraries don‘t sell anything. Also authors and publishers get payed for having their books in the library (how and how much varies by country). Authors and publishers get nothing for having their books put into AI training data. Hence the former is a public service, and the latter is theft.
Yes it is, but at least they are not charging for the access.
Libraries used to require membership and dues. Those then bought more books on the used or retail market. LOTS of fights were about that system, cause book publishers hated libraries. And well, they still do.
And to be fair, fuck copyright. Its holds all of us back, so someone can go "FUCK YOU, NO". And nobody or company deserves what is it, 70 years+ death copyright length.
And with the recent Anthropic settlement, used to be, for-profit pirates would go to prison. I also remember absurd 2000's settlements over Britney Spears and Metallica for $5000-$7000 for 20 songs.
You are not going to win me over on massive gatekeeping human knowledge over "Itssss ill-eagle!". I know, and I don't care. And if I'm ever in a case over this, I'll tank it.
The censorship of US models is so bad (read: guardrails), that they had to use GLM 5.2 on their own hardware to do the analysis. That's how locked down, restrictive, and closed source American models are. They're basically for-profit piracy by way of selling tokens.
Whereas the Chinese models are just "here you go, download and run".
I know what I run. Qwen3.5 and 3.6 and GLM5.2 . USA token vendors are incentivised in doing worse to sell more slot machine tokens.
You can accept it or not. But it's going to be a lot easier if you do.
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.
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.
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.
People really have to stop sanewashing the government, it doesn't work anymore, these people are not thinking through what they're doing.
/s
Yes, the US has an idiot in charge who is threatening these things in response, too. However, unlike China, the electorate does not support him. His election is also almost certainly due to aggressive campaigns to destabilize the US internally for this exact purpose.
Didn't happen. An intervention happened. An invasion lasts more than two hours.
I think this Chinese invasion fleet is lost and it accidentally blockaded tiny country of Cuba instead of Taiwan, they are blocking EU attempts at a rescue and children die in hospitals because there is no fuel and no power.
Terrible navigational error
China is actually the adult in the room and your are a victim of propaganda.
Since 1979, 45 years ago, China has not dropped a single bomb on foreign land. That’s two generations peace.
In that timeframe, USA has attacked 37 countries, France 22, Britain 10, and Italy has attacked 6.
What determines if a country is a threat? Simple test - would they arrest Eipstein and execute him?
More politically correct phrasing - “do they respect American economic elites.” ?
If the answer is no, the country is ‘a threat to the west’
You don’t believe me? Name 2 countries that don’t fit this model.
And if you disagree with the way they run their country, and that makes them a threat. Then it seems you a problem with the concept of an independent country.
You’re a tiny bit late on that one
You should care because of the nukes, if nothing else.
For all we know some crafty contractors or NCOs have been making very good money off of selling "spare" parts - just like we saw when Russia first tried to invade Ukraine...
As eipstein proved, it definitely ain’t morals
I'm sorry, but only one "party" is comprised of fascist plutocrats speed-running the end of democracy in the USA.
The USA and world would be a vastly different place had a different party maintained power in the USA 10 years ago.
It is well known that China is still engaged in trade with Russia- oil and gold going one way, drones and weapon components going the other.
But you said funding, and I assume you meant things like grants or loans. Do you have any sources for that? I could only find one that was attributed to indirect open source intelligence, nothing specific.
China is not actively involved in any war at all. They may be supporting Russia with resources, but it's nowhere near the level of material and diplomatic support that the USA is providing to Israel's genocide and war of aggression on Lebanon.
When the investments fail there will be volatility but it’s hardly existential for the US. Open models are good for the whole world, I would argue it’s a net positive for individuals.
There is some blame on all sides for sure, not saying it's black and white...but come on.
1. China is actively genociding an entire ethnic people.
2. They are actively building a military larger and faster than any country on earth in all of history.
3. They are actively threatening ALL of their neighbors with war. Actively attacking their ships and building military bases in other countries territory.
4. China's open stated goals are to conquer and control its neighbors and every single step over the last 10 years is proof of that.
The US stupidly withdrawing from the world stage is definitely making this worse, of course, but it is not the catalyst. It's unfortunately a very likely side effect of a social media campaign by the same actor to make said hot war easier to win.
At least admit the double standard. I don't mind realpolitik but it's so tedious when it's not plainly stated and there's this veneer of civility.
Yes, the US is allowed to do whatever it wants to in South America. No, other nation states don't have a sphere of geographic influence if the US doesn't want them to.
If you care about democracy and human rights, it's morally reprehensible NOT to support Taiwan. We can debate the ethics of intervening in strongman dictatorships like Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran, but Taiwan is clear.
China didn't make us do this any more than they made us bomb civilian fishing boats in South America. We are a major destabilizing force at the moment, China existing does not somehow negate the actions we take of our own free will.
Refusing to acknowledge our role in destabilizing the globe at the moment is a level of infantilization that I, and many others, find unacceptable. We are all adults, China is responsible for their role and the US is responsible for its role. A social media campaign is not forcing the folks in Washington to drop bombs on Iranian civilian infrastructure, the jack asses in Washington did all of this on their own
> Our biggest geopolitical rival that's been threatening a hot war also distilling the things we build is not a good thing
They didn't distill Fable, it is impossible on any timeline. So where do we go next, the start of this thread is a complete dead-end as it is asserting a falsehood
This was the comment i responded to so we can get back on track to that comment if you'd like
> I think the major destabilizing force is the country that has been building the infrastructure for a hot war over Taiwan for the last decade while simultaneously blatantly funding the conquest of Ukraine.
We are refusing to aid Ukraine and actively antagonize their leader. We are kidnapping leaders from other countries. We are bombing civilian infrastructure. We are the major destabilizing force, not the one planning a hypothetical invasion
It’s ridiculous to compare China to the US when it comes to warmongering. They’re not even in the same ballpark.
All of them. Pretending there is a benevolent bully among Russia, China and America is baseless.
This is probably the strongest moral argument for open-weight models. It decouples AI, somewhat, from military-industrial might.
This is a thought-terminating cliche. (The folks telling you to stop being sheeple are unusually consistently claimed independent thinkers.)
> How much damage has China done recently militarily?
Exempting the Iran war, which has no justification, as much as America. We’re both backing proxies. (Though we’ve had a while since we shot at or annexed our neighbours.)
I’m not. I’m saying exempting that, we have an even field of conflict mongering. Counting Iran, the field is biased, but we have significant sampling-timing issues for something like “is there war.”
China has violently annexed sovereign countries in the past decades. Its threats to do the same again are at least as serious as Trump’s Greenland nonsense. There can be more than one baddie.
If China had special forces deployed and conducting ops in random African countries it would be a massive aggression. When we do it, it doesn't even make the headlines.
It’s literally doing this across its maritime and mountain boundaries! It does cause outrage, albeit less so in mass media.
To be clear, American fuckery is broader. But if we agree we’re discussing magnitudes and not kind, we agree on all I’m arguing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_border_dispute
We're talking about this kind of thing balancing out, say, Fallujah or shock and awe over Baghdad.
Nonsense. For that comparison you’d look to the invasion and annexation of Tibet. (And it’s not ancient history if it’s currently endorsed and un-apologized for.)
Any fair look at both countries' records puts the US as doing 10-100x more military intervention, on a global rather than regional scale.
An outright lie. The only possible candidate is Tibet but it's former sovereignty is very questionable and not clear cut
Same as Taliban-run Afghanistan, same as Iraq, same as Ukraine, same as Taiwan.
Calling the territory you’re invading and/or annexing illegitimately independent, illegitimately governed is how these always go.
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.
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.
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>.
Yes, China is a rival. No, they have not won. Their economy is in a lot of trouble, likely far worse than the shape of the US's currently. That situation may accelerate a hot war though, as has historically been the case globally.
Don’t create fictional versions of the people you argue with. This is the second time in a span of 10 minutes that you’ve done it. It completely undermines any attempt to discuss something, and drops your integrity to zero.
Or are they just Western economists repeating Western bias under a veil of objectivity?
USA: https://www.linkedin.com/videos/tpopomaronis_ive-seen-some-e...
China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUbbBdSGHE8
But... China is definitely copying... Hahahahha
China’s youth unemployment rate is 15%, and that’s likely heavily astroturfed to look lower than it is. Even 15% though is terrifying for a mature economy.
China's one-child policy is finally starting to hit, and its population is actively shrinking. At the moment China is not in a crisis yet, as its GDP is still growing quite well - so clearly there's plenty of economic activity.
So if a lot of old people are now retiring, and the young can't find jobs, who is doing the work? China is still a factory powerhouse, so who's screwing together the gadgets?
The answer is that they have been pushing heavily for automation, and it is working. Our biggest chance of beating China on a free market was domestic automation versus cheap overseas labor - but they have gotten there first. And that should be absolutely terrifying you.
Like ours would if we had 15% youth unemployment.
Maybe we’re projecting our values?
https://www.dongascience.com/en/news/75540
China leads in 66 of 74 critical tech areas. The USA has a whopping... 8.
But hey, the USA's MBA "leadership" figures how much to worsen everything and extract more profit. I guess that counts for "innovation", in the Private Equity books.
In all the ways that matter, China is rapidly racing towards or even past the West. We've been pretending that it is possible to remain relevant on the world stage while only offering services and a handful of luxury goods. A China without the West would be a painful transition, but the West without China? A massacre.
China hasn't won yet primarily because the West hasn't even figured out it is in a competition. We're getting our asses kicked and don't even realize it yet! Worst of all? The Western capitalists created China, all for a few cents of shareholder value...
Source: trust me bro
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).
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...
Other countries have a say about it.
The AI training part of the court case was deemed fair use.
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.
No, it was asked to pay book authors because it pirated copies of books and stored them on their hard drives. The ruling had nothing to do with training.
If training wasn't considered outside the law, this goes on to make the point about double standards for US vs Chinese model training methods.
I think the Aaron Schwartz case is incredibly vexing because he was obviously acting out of a sense of altruism without personal self-interest. I don't think he deserved the book getting thrown at him like that. But the whole copyright system, which people seem to think is simultaneously good and bad, kinda rests on not allowing those kinds of violations
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.
Bought, scanned and destroyed them I believe. The judge okay'd Destructive Scanning.
https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/bartz-...
You need to destroy the _physical copy_ that you scanned.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. Instead, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. More formatting info here.*
Now that Chevron is no more, EOs are even weaker than they used to be because the regulatory agencies no longer have teeth.
Premature compliance != legally required compliance. Anyone complying early to an EO when they don't have to is an idiot.
For the more egregious ones, there are temporary restraining orders... days/weeks/months later.
So, yes, he can do that, and yes, he can be overruled on them, and yes, that happens after some damage has already been done.
Well this doesn’t even make sense.
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.