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I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology devel

I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) so there was no good faith policy justification for imposing an export control. This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors. We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.

willsmith72 3mo ago
silly or corrupt?
geuis 3mo ago
I still remember when Netscape had outdated ssl for a few years because more advanced cryptography was classified by the US gov as armaments or something. Basically used export restrictions to prevent better security technology from being adopted into commercial products.
- londons_explore 3mo ago
  Which was a clear as day message that "We have ways to decrypt this, but can't yet decrypt that, so please use the one we can snoop on". Yet somehow we're always forgetting that lesson and surprised when government is found snooping.
  - mortehu 3mo ago
    They didn't have some secret way of defeating 40 bit encryption; anyone could do it. 512 bit asymmetric encryption was also brute forced by a private entity, albeit at a high budget.
- jasonfarnon 3mo ago
  I'd forgotten all the government attempts at controlling crypto like PGP in the early internet days. It is one straightforward way to look at what's happening here without resorting to speculation about this administration's motives.
- mr_sturd 3mo ago
  So the solution should be to publish the models + weights in a book.
  - webXL 3mo ago
    Yes, a really, really BIG book!
pants2 3mo ago
I don't see your point why export control is a silly tool. There's a difference between a VPN which I can prop up on my home server or a $5 VPS, vs a Mythos-scale closed source model running on millions of dollars of hardware
- holmesworcester 3mo ago
  I mean, if the stated intent of an export control is to allow domestic use but prevent export, achieving the stated intent is impossible, because every developer in the world wants the latest models and will get a VPN.
  - vr46 3mo ago
    A VPN won't work in this instance without a US credit card. So it's completely possible.
    - esseph 3mo ago
      I'm so glad none of those US credit cards have never been stolen. Can you imagine the disaster???
    - iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
      As other posted noted, US cc is, by far, the easiest piece of information to acquire by a determined actor. Possible and inconvenience, but that is about it. Why is that? Well, not to search very far, I just got a breach notice from a company I never heard of the other day. They are sorry.
  - jack_pp 3mo ago
    Harder to hide payment info than ip origin
    - ElProlactin 3mo ago
      It is trivially easy for nation states, non-nation bad actors, etc. to use US payments. I'd guess that most of the financial scams targeting Americans rely on US-based mules and their American bank accounts. Also, foreign nationals legally residing in the US can have access to US-based payments. There's no way when accepting a credit card payment from a US card issuer to ask whether the card holder is a natural born citizen versus Green Card holder, etc.
jcutrell 3mo ago
Silly or not, precedent matters and labeling it silly is rhetorical. The impact is going to be critically important.
bigyabai 3mo ago
I think this is also overly naive. We live in a world of hardware attestation and passkeys, the baseline requirements to use new models can increase to cryptocurrency-levels of KYC. If this becomes the new norm (which it easily could), then the best models will impose increasingly restrictive requirements.
- holmesworcester 3mo ago
  The statement said that even foreign nationals within the US would be barred. That seems intentionally unworkable to me, and makes me think that the intent was to be more restrictive/disruptive than even an export control. It is hard to tell what the internal discussions are, but given the last run-in between the administration and Anthropic, and given the administration's politicization of nearly everything, I think it's likely that this is not necessarily a long term across-the-board policy plan. I agree that it's really hard to tell from the outside, but if I had to guess I think we still have more to worry about on the side of "Wall Street races to superintelligence" than on the side of "KYC for AI". I could be wrong though.
libraryofbabel 3mo ago
I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both? It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.
- gpm 3mo ago
  > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever Yes. I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware. (This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)
  - tw1984 3mo ago
    > I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.
    - strangegecko 3mo ago
      Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.
thazework 3mo ago
GEO blocking is not the same as blocking based on nationality. I'd like(?) to think someone in this decision chain realized "restricting to US nationals" meant effectively restricting it to all and chose this route knowing Antrophic would need to just pull the model (so engaging in censorship without calling it that, possibly less susceptible to court challenges).
- LordDragonfang 3mo ago
  I'm less confident in that. To me the way the announcement reads as malicious compliance -- this administration is extremely petty in its dealings, and it's not outside the realm of possibility they asked for and would have accepted an essentially symbolic ban, something that anyone with technical knowledge and a VPN could bypass. Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. The fact that the post does not mention any such discussion, and leaves the nonsensical request as the only stated reason, makes this feel like a power move by Dario, simply complying in the most dramatic and rage-inducing way and announcing it in a way to direct that rage at the USG. (Which is, IMO, a savvy move)
  - fauigerzigerk 3mo ago
    >Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. It's not nonsensical if the intention is to destroy Anthropic. There is nothing to explain. Anthropic has been trying to leverage government intervention and dishonest security bluster for competitive advantage and now the Trump admin is using it as a pretext to destroy them ahead of the IPO.
  - greyman 3mo ago
    From my login credentials Anthropic do not know I am non-US national. They could deduce it from my chats, but that would take some time to implemwnt.
  - mrandish 3mo ago
Aeolun 3mo ago
> This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.
- locknitpicker 3mo ago
  > This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally. Let's not forget the Trump administration threatened two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation, and then had the gall to complain they were not helping them attack Iran.
- baq 3mo ago
  US has some questionable allies themselves who happily and remorselessly stole top secret information including nuclear secrets.
- nxm 3mo ago
  A friend who takes advantage of you wasn’t your friend all along
ilaksh 3mo ago
It's also possible that they literally are too dumb to realize they asked for something infeasible. For example, the same main character who apparently gave up a career as an extra in made-for-TV WWII German movies to become a very high ranking government official.
sandcat_ 3mo ago
Agreed. This is no different from the US government attempting to control SSH, or restrict the sale of the Apple Power Mac. 10 years from now we’ll look back and laugh at how silly it all was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
nl 3mo ago
VPNs won't work when they do document (passport) verification.
- bluegatty 3mo ago
  Your company won't allow you to use export restricted technology or risk going out of business instantly.
  - nl 3mo ago
    Not sure if you are agreeing with my point or not. But I assure you that many places will be happy to switch up to Fable when it's available and back to Opus when it's not. It's a programming tool, not something that will send you out of business if it disappears.
bluegatty 3mo ago
"effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) " No - it's extremely effective. Do you realize the difference between a 'few people using VPNs + fake IDs at 2-person companies ... vs companies all companies globally not allowed to use tech? If 'Bank of Montreal' were caught using export controlled technology it could be devastating - so they're not going to be using it along with any little mom and pop shop. We don't know what the Administration is doing other than 'This is Extremely Heavy Handed' and will have devastating consequences if it goes on.
yoyohello13 3mo ago
We need to stop making light of these things. Governments don’t do ‘silly’ things. When you wield that kind of power over people’s lives, everything you do is deadly serious.
- rob74 3mo ago
  Yes. What Elon did with DOGE (including but not limited to destroying USAID) may have been stupid and barely saved any money at all if you look at it as a percentage of the total budget, but it had very real consequences for real people. But, because they were mostly people from Trump's "shithole countries", no one talks about it anymore.
themgt 3mo ago
I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. ... We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. So it's silly behavior, as typified by the last decade of American governance? Is there "serious" American leadership we should be expecting to see soon, e.g. 2029 AOC elected on a platform of unlimited 10GW datacenters and universal basic Mythos 8 models? It may seem subjectively silly to you, but e.g. getting executed for refusing to point at a deer and call it a horse is pretty silly stuff as well, at least for those not living in the Qin Dynasty. US voters deserve better. Deserve's got nothing to do with it.
- hardbass 3mo ago
  How does a data center harm me? I have seen how incredibly stupid the average (dem or republican both)'s reasons are. If not outright lizard brain radiation beams, more than once I have seen claims of it producing "toxic waste" which is absolutely absurd.
  - sersi 3mo ago
    Cheaply designed datacenter that don't use a close loop for watercooling and use too much water are a problem
  - Symbiote 3mo ago
    Increased energy prices, increased local pollution, increased climate change. (And waste electronics are considered hazardous in the EU.)
    - hardbass 3mo ago
      What is the mode of pollution here? And why is the energy price an issue rather than a need to revamp the electricity production?
      - bogeholm 3mo ago
        > why is the energy price an issue Electricity is sold on the market. If you live next to a data center you can choose not to use any services enabled by that center, but you cannot choose to pay non-datacenter prices for the electricity to charge your car or run your household
blueblisters 3mo ago
> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better. With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world. US politicians and elite, regardless of political inclination, understand the enormous strategic potential of this technology and will ITAR the shit out of frontier models and/or use them as leverage for extracting concessions out of other countries. The main losers are Big AI labs, their investors, foreign employees and rest of the world. Fwiw, China and other countries would’ve done the exact same thing. It’s perhaps the game theoretic optimal approach when your comparative advantage is so vast (capital, compute, talent, embedded knowledge) and keeps growing especially if RSI is real (making it nearly impossible for anyone else to catch up)
- fauigerzigerk 3mo ago
  >With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world. Really? You think the economics of the AI buildout remain viable if US companies cannot export their highest value services? You think expelling foreign AI researchers doesn't hurt the industry or boost foreign competitors? Half (or whatever) of Google's AI team, including their AI chief are foreign nationals and/or located outside of the US. You think that other IT exports will not suffer if the US turns out to be an unreliable and even capricious supplier? This does real damage to the US economy.
  - blueblisters 3mo ago
    I humbly accept it's very difficult to game this out with any degree of confidence, especially as other countries deploy more resources. But the questions about viability of the labs because of export restrictions is not in my cone of uncertainty. If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked. Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, economy-wide automation would make the US wealthy beyond imagination. US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP. I am not aware of the international revenue share for OpenAI/Anthropic.
hbarka 3mo ago
> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. Can we stop with this bothsides-ing. The level of co-opting by this administration is unprecedented. There’s the strong-arming to get Intel equity stake, Nvidia/AMD revenue share, U.S. Steel golden share, Lithium Americas equity stake, Big Law pro bono pledges, TikTok forcible acquisition, Paramount-CBS-Skydance favor, it’s just unbelievable the stark use of power.
- Schmerika 3mo ago
  No, we can not stop with the both sidesing. We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump. Don't think I'm justifying that - it's just what happened, in basically the tech bros own words. The Dems then proceeded to lose to Trump, despite being extremely well funded themselves. They accomplished this through a spectacular series of "own goals": arming genocide, vetoing ceasefires, forcing deeply unpopular candidates, allowing a certain attempted insurrectionist rapist run out the clock on justice [0], awful elitist messaging on the economy, keeping the Epstein files under wraps, etc. The red side is worse than the blue side, so the blue side demand immunity from criticism. The red side sets everything on fire, on purpose. The blue side prevents progressives from real change. The cycle rachets and repeats. This has been going on for decades, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars - but people who point it out get accused of saying both sides are the same. 0 - "That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition." - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-race https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-rac...
  - hbarka 3mo ago
    > This has been going on for decades With statements like that, if it’s been going on that long then it’s either our culture and normal way of life or you’re on some QAnon cuckoo rabbit hole.
    - 3mo ago
sreekanth850 3mo ago
Every F35 is exported with a killswitch. and you think this is a silly decision? its not silly, its gatekeeping, iam sure this will get much strict in future, where even developing a frontier model can get sanctions from US. IMO Every country need AI sovereignty and its right time to form a group or consortium of nations to fund and build an equally capable frontier model that is accessible to all others. AI should not be confined to certain nations, the way nuclear capabilities are restricted.
- markoman 3mo ago
  This killswitch claim is false and would be a huge vulnerability if it existed.
  - pseudony 3mo ago
    You don’t need a fancy kill switch, just stop sending parts and updates, any sustained conflict will do the work. Any F35 bought by Europe is nothing short of lunacy. You don’t buy from people hell-bent on having conflicts with you.
    - sreekanth850 3mo ago
      Excatly and even more they are stripped version. Export version is always inferior.
      - baq 3mo ago
        Except the Israeli versions obviously. These are at least on par with domestic.
        sreekanth850 3mo ago
        Iam not sure about this, may be true. But in general exported products are always less capable. Be it f35, brahmos or s400.
    - 3mo ago
anilakar 3mo ago
Nineties called and they want their shitty export grade computing back. Anyone still remember OpenBSD?
orangeoxidation 3mo ago
> I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.[...] This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors. "Silly" is a silly word for corruption.
devkakadiya 3mo ago
[flagged]
motbus3 3mo ago
Or that would be even a better excuse to ban the usage of VPN than csam
baq 3mo ago
> silly behavior by a government I can hear alarm bells going off in less silly governments around the world as we speak. Genie's out of the bottle. The gears have been put in motion. Etc.
epolanski 3mo ago
> US voters deserve better. Yes, something better than a winner-take-all system. We have now enough data about modern democracies to conclude that presidential and semi-presidential republics are flawed. Winner-take-all mechanics are not democratic, period, they give voters very little choice to be represented (generally a handful of parties), just two in the US. People aren't "conservative" or "liberal". They have a huge and diverse array on topics ranging from education, immigration, healthcare, privacy, civil rights, public spending, foreign policies, etc, etc, etc. Yet we bind people to choose among a handful of parties, which at best overlap with some of those opinions, just to elect a single person that is extremely hard to remove (both from a legal point of view and a from that person's rightful ability to claim popular mandate), that do not rely on confidence votes nor their own party support. And that individual, in the end, really represents fully a very minority of the country (because of the points before) and can also do the opposite of what the promises were, unchecked. And from a democracy safety itself, please not that every single country turning authoritarian in the last 60 years has been either presidential or semi presidential. Sri Lanka in the 70s is the only exception, there are no others. All others have been presidential.
jMyles 3mo ago
The problem with the (accurate and useful) "silly behavior by a government" characterization is that, far too often, when governments behave and silly and childish ways, large corporations still treat their dictates as legitimate. Obviously nobody actually buys this (now 6 decade-old) ridiculous fiction that structured signals on a network (ie, information, thought, knowledge) are tantamount to a weapon that can be exported. I don't think many people believe it's the legitimate purvey of government to police what can be said on the internet at all. But instead of the well-earned, "go to bed, grandpa, you're drunk again", companies act as though article II of the constitution specifically said, "vested in the executive branch is the power to violently repress proliferation of knowledge." So yes, it's a silly idea by an outdated institution which is swirling the drain. But it's not being treated that way where it counts.

willsmith72 3mo ago

silly or corrupt?

geuis 3mo ago

I still remember when Netscape had outdated ssl for a few years because more advanced cryptography was classified by the US gov as armaments or something. Basically used export restrictions to prevent better security technology from being adopted into commercial products.

londons_explore 3mo ago
Which was a clear as day message that "We have ways to decrypt this, but can't yet decrypt that, so please use the one we can snoop on". Yet somehow we're always forgetting that lesson and surprised when government is found snooping.
- mortehu 3mo ago
  They didn't have some secret way of defeating 40 bit encryption; anyone could do it. 512 bit asymmetric encryption was also brute forced by a private entity, albeit at a high budget.
jasonfarnon 3mo ago
I'd forgotten all the government attempts at controlling crypto like PGP in the early internet days. It is one straightforward way to look at what's happening here without resorting to speculation about this administration's motives.
mr_sturd 3mo ago
So the solution should be to publish the models + weights in a book.
- webXL 3mo ago
  Yes, a really, really BIG book!

pants2 3mo ago

I don't see your point why export control is a silly tool. There's a difference between a VPN which I can prop up on my home server or a $5 VPS, vs a Mythos-scale closed source model running on millions of dollars of hardware

holmesworcester 3mo ago
I mean, if the stated intent of an export control is to allow domestic use but prevent export, achieving the stated intent is impossible, because every developer in the world wants the latest models and will get a VPN.
- vr46 3mo ago
  A VPN won't work in this instance without a US credit card. So it's completely possible.
  - esseph 3mo ago
    I'm so glad none of those US credit cards have never been stolen. Can you imagine the disaster???
  - iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
    As other posted noted, US cc is, by far, the easiest piece of information to acquire by a determined actor. Possible and inconvenience, but that is about it. Why is that? Well, not to search very far, I just got a breach notice from a company I never heard of the other day. They are sorry.
- jack_pp 3mo ago
  Harder to hide payment info than ip origin
  - ElProlactin 3mo ago
    It is trivially easy for nation states, non-nation bad actors, etc. to use US payments. I'd guess that most of the financial scams targeting Americans rely on US-based mules and their American bank accounts. Also, foreign nationals legally residing in the US can have access to US-based payments. There's no way when accepting a credit card payment from a US card issuer to ask whether the card holder is a natural born citizen versus Green Card holder, etc.

jcutrell 3mo ago

Silly or not, precedent matters and labeling it silly is rhetorical. The impact is going to be critically important.

bigyabai 3mo ago

I think this is also overly naive. We live in a world of hardware attestation and passkeys, the baseline requirements to use new models can increase to cryptocurrency-levels of KYC. If this becomes the new norm (which it easily could), then the best models will impose increasingly restrictive requirements.

holmesworcester 3mo ago
The statement said that even foreign nationals within the US would be barred. That seems intentionally unworkable to me, and makes me think that the intent was to be more restrictive/disruptive than even an export control. It is hard to tell what the internal discussions are, but given the last run-in between the administration and Anthropic, and given the administration's politicization of nearly everything, I think it's likely that this is not necessarily a long term across-the-board policy plan. I agree that it's really hard to tell from the outside, but if I had to guess I think we still have more to worry about on the side of "Wall Street races to superintelligence" than on the side of "KYC for AI". I could be wrong though.

libraryofbabel 3mo ago

I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both? It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.

gpm 3mo ago
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever Yes. I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware. (This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)
- tw1984 3mo ago
  > I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.
  - strangegecko 3mo ago
    Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.

thazework 3mo ago

GEO blocking is not the same as blocking based on nationality. I'd like(?) to think someone in this decision chain realized "restricting to US nationals" meant effectively restricting it to all and chose this route knowing Antrophic would need to just pull the model (so engaging in censorship without calling it that, possibly less susceptible to court challenges).

LordDragonfang 3mo ago
I'm less confident in that. To me the way the announcement reads as malicious compliance -- this administration is extremely petty in its dealings, and it's not outside the realm of possibility they asked for and would have accepted an essentially symbolic ban, something that anyone with technical knowledge and a VPN could bypass. Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. The fact that the post does not mention any such discussion, and leaves the nonsensical request as the only stated reason, makes this feel like a power move by Dario, simply complying in the most dramatic and rage-inducing way and announcing it in a way to direct that rage at the USG. (Which is, IMO, a savvy move)
- fauigerzigerk 3mo ago
  >Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. It's not nonsensical if the intention is to destroy Anthropic. There is nothing to explain. Anthropic has been trying to leverage government intervention and dishonest security bluster for competitive advantage and now the Trump admin is using it as a pretext to destroy them ahead of the IPO.
- greyman 3mo ago
  From my login credentials Anthropic do not know I am non-US national. They could deduce it from my chats, but that would take some time to implemwnt.
- mrandish 3mo ago

Aeolun 3mo ago

> This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.

locknitpicker 3mo ago
> This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally. Let's not forget the Trump administration threatened two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation, and then had the gall to complain they were not helping them attack Iran.
baq 3mo ago
US has some questionable allies themselves who happily and remorselessly stole top secret information including nuclear secrets.
nxm 3mo ago
A friend who takes advantage of you wasn’t your friend all along

ilaksh 3mo ago

It's also possible that they literally are too dumb to realize they asked for something infeasible. For example, the same main character who apparently gave up a career as an extra in made-for-TV WWII German movies to become a very high ranking government official.

sandcat_ 3mo ago

Agreed. This is no different from the US government attempting to control SSH, or restrict the sale of the Apple Power Mac. 10 years from now we’ll look back and laugh at how silly it all was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

nl 3mo ago

VPNs won't work when they do document (passport) verification.

bluegatty 3mo ago
Your company won't allow you to use export restricted technology or risk going out of business instantly.
- nl 3mo ago
  Not sure if you are agreeing with my point or not. But I assure you that many places will be happy to switch up to Fable when it's available and back to Opus when it's not. It's a programming tool, not something that will send you out of business if it disappears.

bluegatty 3mo ago

"effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) " No - it's extremely effective. Do you realize the difference between a 'few people using VPNs + fake IDs at 2-person companies ... vs companies all companies globally not allowed to use tech? If 'Bank of Montreal' were caught using export controlled technology it could be devastating - so they're not going to be using it along with any little mom and pop shop. We don't know what the Administration is doing other than 'This is Extremely Heavy Handed' and will have devastating consequences if it goes on.

yoyohello13 3mo ago

We need to stop making light of these things. Governments don’t do ‘silly’ things. When you wield that kind of power over people’s lives, everything you do is deadly serious.

rob74 3mo ago
Yes. What Elon did with DOGE (including but not limited to destroying USAID) may have been stupid and barely saved any money at all if you look at it as a percentage of the total budget, but it had very real consequences for real people. But, because they were mostly people from Trump's "shithole countries", no one talks about it anymore.

themgt 3mo ago

I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. ... We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. So it's silly behavior, as typified by the last decade of American governance? Is there "serious" American leadership we should be expecting to see soon, e.g. 2029 AOC elected on a platform of unlimited 10GW datacenters and universal basic Mythos 8 models? It may seem subjectively silly to you, but e.g. getting executed for refusing to point at a deer and call it a horse is pretty silly stuff as well, at least for those not living in the Qin Dynasty. US voters deserve better. Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

hardbass 3mo ago
How does a data center harm me? I have seen how incredibly stupid the average (dem or republican both)'s reasons are. If not outright lizard brain radiation beams, more than once I have seen claims of it producing "toxic waste" which is absolutely absurd.
- sersi 3mo ago
  Cheaply designed datacenter that don't use a close loop for watercooling and use too much water are a problem
- Symbiote 3mo ago
  Increased energy prices, increased local pollution, increased climate change. (And waste electronics are considered hazardous in the EU.)
  - hardbass 3mo ago
    What is the mode of pollution here? And why is the energy price an issue rather than a need to revamp the electricity production?
    - bogeholm 3mo ago
      > why is the energy price an issue Electricity is sold on the market. If you live next to a data center you can choose not to use any services enabled by that center, but you cannot choose to pay non-datacenter prices for the electricity to charge your car or run your household

blueblisters 3mo ago

> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better. With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world. US politicians and elite, regardless of political inclination, understand the enormous strategic potential of this technology and will ITAR the shit out of frontier models and/or use them as leverage for extracting concessions out of other countries. The main losers are Big AI labs, their investors, foreign employees and rest of the world. Fwiw, China and other countries would’ve done the exact same thing. It’s perhaps the game theoretic optimal approach when your comparative advantage is so vast (capital, compute, talent, embedded knowledge) and keeps growing especially if RSI is real (making it nearly impossible for anyone else to catch up)

fauigerzigerk 3mo ago
>With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world. Really? You think the economics of the AI buildout remain viable if US companies cannot export their highest value services? You think expelling foreign AI researchers doesn't hurt the industry or boost foreign competitors? Half (or whatever) of Google's AI team, including their AI chief are foreign nationals and/or located outside of the US. You think that other IT exports will not suffer if the US turns out to be an unreliable and even capricious supplier? This does real damage to the US economy.
- blueblisters 3mo ago
  I humbly accept it's very difficult to game this out with any degree of confidence, especially as other countries deploy more resources. But the questions about viability of the labs because of export restrictions is not in my cone of uncertainty. If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked. Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, economy-wide automation would make the US wealthy beyond imagination. US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP. I am not aware of the international revenue share for OpenAI/Anthropic.

hbarka 3mo ago

> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. Can we stop with this bothsides-ing. The level of co-opting by this administration is unprecedented. There’s the strong-arming to get Intel equity stake, Nvidia/AMD revenue share, U.S. Steel golden share, Lithium Americas equity stake, Big Law pro bono pledges, TikTok forcible acquisition, Paramount-CBS-Skydance favor, it’s just unbelievable the stark use of power.

Schmerika 3mo ago
No, we can not stop with the both sidesing. We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump. Don't think I'm justifying that - it's just what happened, in basically the tech bros own words. The Dems then proceeded to lose to Trump, despite being extremely well funded themselves. They accomplished this through a spectacular series of "own goals": arming genocide, vetoing ceasefires, forcing deeply unpopular candidates, allowing a certain attempted insurrectionist rapist run out the clock on justice [0], awful elitist messaging on the economy, keeping the Epstein files under wraps, etc. The red side is worse than the blue side, so the blue side demand immunity from criticism. The red side sets everything on fire, on purpose. The blue side prevents progressives from real change. The cycle rachets and repeats. This has been going on for decades, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars - but people who point it out get accused of saying both sides are the same. 0 - "That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition." - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-race https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-rac...
- hbarka 3mo ago
  > This has been going on for decades With statements like that, if it’s been going on that long then it’s either our culture and normal way of life or you’re on some QAnon cuckoo rabbit hole.
  - 3mo ago

sreekanth850 3mo ago

Every F35 is exported with a killswitch. and you think this is a silly decision? its not silly, its gatekeeping, iam sure this will get much strict in future, where even developing a frontier model can get sanctions from US. IMO Every country need AI sovereignty and its right time to form a group or consortium of nations to fund and build an equally capable frontier model that is accessible to all others. AI should not be confined to certain nations, the way nuclear capabilities are restricted.

markoman 3mo ago
This killswitch claim is false and would be a huge vulnerability if it existed.
- pseudony 3mo ago
  You don’t need a fancy kill switch, just stop sending parts and updates, any sustained conflict will do the work. Any F35 bought by Europe is nothing short of lunacy. You don’t buy from people hell-bent on having conflicts with you.
  - sreekanth850 3mo ago
    Excatly and even more they are stripped version. Export version is always inferior.
    - baq 3mo ago
      Except the Israeli versions obviously. These are at least on par with domestic.
      - sreekanth850 3mo ago
        Iam not sure about this, may be true. But in general exported products are always less capable. Be it f35, brahmos or s400.
  - 3mo ago

anilakar 3mo ago

Nineties called and they want their shitty export grade computing back. Anyone still remember OpenBSD?

orangeoxidation 3mo ago

> I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.[...] This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors. "Silly" is a silly word for corruption.

devkakadiya 3mo ago

[flagged]

motbus3 3mo ago

Or that would be even a better excuse to ban the usage of VPN than csam

baq 3mo ago

> silly behavior by a government I can hear alarm bells going off in less silly governments around the world as we speak. Genie's out of the bottle. The gears have been put in motion. Etc.

epolanski 3mo ago

> US voters deserve better. Yes, something better than a winner-take-all system. We have now enough data about modern democracies to conclude that presidential and semi-presidential republics are flawed. Winner-take-all mechanics are not democratic, period, they give voters very little choice to be represented (generally a handful of parties), just two in the US. People aren't "conservative" or "liberal". They have a huge and diverse array on topics ranging from education, immigration, healthcare, privacy, civil rights, public spending, foreign policies, etc, etc, etc. Yet we bind people to choose among a handful of parties, which at best overlap with some of those opinions, just to elect a single person that is extremely hard to remove (both from a legal point of view and a from that person's rightful ability to claim popular mandate), that do not rely on confidence votes nor their own party support. And that individual, in the end, really represents fully a very minority of the country (because of the points before) and can also do the opposite of what the promises were, unchecked. And from a democracy safety itself, please not that every single country turning authoritarian in the last 60 years has been either presidential or semi presidential. Sri Lanka in the 70s is the only exception, there are no others. All others have been presidential.

jMyles 3mo ago

The problem with the (accurate and useful) "silly behavior by a government" characterization is that, far too often, when governments behave and silly and childish ways, large corporations still treat their dictates as legitimate. Obviously nobody actually buys this (now 6 decade-old) ridiculous fiction that structured signals on a network (ie, information, thought, knowledge) are tantamount to a weapon that can be exported. I don't think many people believe it's the legitimate purvey of government to police what can be said on the internet at all. But instead of the well-earned, "go to bed, grandpa, you're drunk again", companies act as though article II of the constitution specifically said, "vested in the executive branch is the power to violently repress proliferation of knowledge." So yes, it's a silly idea by an outdated institution which is swirling the drain. But it's not being treated that way where it counts.