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If this becomes the norm, what incentive does the rest of the world have to keep their markets open to the US? If US companies have a large unfair advantage su

If this becomes the norm, what incentive does the rest of the world have to keep their markets open to the US? If US companies have a large unfair advantage such that domestic competitors are no longer able to compete, then wouldn't it make sense for governments around the world to ban or tariff US products and services? If I was responsible for national economic policy, I would place this at the top of my non-emergency agenda. The world needs to act quick before their industries fail.

grumple 3mo ago
Is the rest of the world really that dependent on emerging AI? I don’t think so. The US could cut off all foreign access to AI, nobody would notice.
- basisword 3mo ago
  It would definitely be a problem. A big one. Think of all the multi-national tech companies that have rolled out AI not only to their engineering teams but to their business teams now too. Suddenly your employees in the US can do more and do it quicker than your employees elsewhere. It would be a nightmare to try and manage.
  - graemep 3mo ago
    That only applies to things Mythos does better than Opus. Mythos is supposedly very good at things such as finding vulnerabilities, but is it better at business tasks? IN the short time I had access to Fable it did not seem noticeably better at things I tried it for (lots of small tasks). Maybe it is better at vibe coding or finding security flaws, but at how much is it sufficiently better to be worth paying the extra?
    - basisword 3mo ago
      You're assuming this export restriction won't apply to any future models. The problem is a couple of years from now when the ROW is still on Opus and US workers are on something much better.
      - graemep 3mo ago
        Which would force us to use Chinese models instead. It would also increase the incentive for other countries to develop models.
  - grumple 3mo ago
    I disagree. I work at a very large international corporation. How much revenue do you think we’ve seen due to AI? I’d guess it’s zero. I know for the groups whose finances I see, it’s zero. Yet costs have gone way up. There’s a bunch of new code, but not anything customers are going to pay more for. And either way no AI basically puts you back to where we were last year. US employees have always been far more productive, that’s nothing new.
    - basisword 3mo ago
      >> There’s a bunch of new code, but not anything customers are going to pay more for. This isn't an AI problem, it's a management issue. Why are you getting devs to build things that aren't going to generate revenue?
      - grumple 3mo ago
        Do you think the only bottleneck in dev has been the speed of coding? I think it’s obvious that this is not the case. It’s finding product market fit, actually discovering and deciding what must be built, and then selling it. And there’s a deeper economic reality: budgets for software are finite and limited, and already close to maxed for most consumers and businesses. If my customers can only afford $500/month total for software, no amount of software I make will push them past that. It’s not just us: where’s the revenue in the entire market? We can see all the public filings. There haven’t been any revenue gains. The only people making money from AI are the LLM providers. And even they are losing money. Even the biggest tech companies are limiting token spend. At best the tech is a new cost just to maintain parity, and I think most businesses look at it as a way to cut dev costs (trading for token spend). I think they will learn that it’s less of a win than they hoped. If a dev was spending 50% of their time coding, and you reduce that to 10% - that’s a big change but it isn’t really making you more because it’s all that time we hate in meetings, understanding customer needs, etc, that make us money.
        Schiendelman 3mo ago
        A lot of the bottleneck is product management now. There's always near infinite work in every engineering team's backlog. Identifying the next few things to improve the product is hard work, with market investigation, competitive analysis, synthesizing user feedback... some of this gets faster with LLMs, certainly. I think most tech companies haven't figured out how to rebalance product to engineering to ensure engineering teams are doing work that grows the business funnel rather than expending tokens on other work.
- sajithdilshan 3mo ago
  Unless your country still use only analogue technology your country would definitely will be at the mercy of the country with AI superiority. Mythos showed how good it is at finding vulnerabilities and attack vectors for digital infrastructure. Imagine an attack on power grid which would result in a days long blackout in the middle of winter?
  - Planktonne 3mo ago
    > your country would definitely will be at the mercy of the country with AI superiority People claim this, but it doesn't seem to be the case at all. We have multiple ongoing conflicts between countries currently, and we're not seeing huge gains from those with more access to AI.
    - sajithdilshan 3mo ago
      Mythos is relatively new and Antrophic has been fighting US government to not allow their models for warfare. However, it’s only a matter of time till they bend the knee and in next 5-10 years we’ll see the effects of that. Previously US used rebel groups to throw governments in other countries that are not US friendly. In the future I can see they can just start chaos by attacking banking systems, energy infrastructure or any other important modern infrastructure until that country falls in line with US
      - Planktonne 3mo ago
        That's all entirely science fiction though, until we see some actual evidence. If Mythos is so incredibly dangerous, then the models before should be at least a little dangerous, and we haven't seen that.
        sajithdilshan 3mo ago
        > That's all entirely science fiction though Current AI was science fiction 5 years ago. But, you're entitled to your opinion, no matter how ignorant it is
spwa4 3mo ago
The US as a large-scale import nation and so does not need the rest of the world (except perhaps Europe, and only small parts) to keep its markets open to the US. Even in the European case, Europe would lose much more than the US would if they closed their markets. Plus, a lot of Europe is either very close to breaking point and unwilling to change (Italy), or rapidly worsening into a crash, and unwilling to change (France). It's Europe that is dependent on a large trade surplus with the rest of the world, financed by dollar loans to 3rd world countries. Now China is taking away their trade surplus, even directly (meaning Europe has a massive trade deficit to China), and indirectly (replacing demand for European goods, famously cars, everywhere). This is causing large-scale job losses in Europe as well as total disaster for government finances across the block, finances that were unhealthy to begin with. Now Europe and China are unwilling to lend to the rest of the world (because initially that would make very rich Europeans/the CCP a little bit poorer, by raising inflation quite a bit, thereby raising interest rates, which will move government finances from disaster to catastrophe), so if these money flows are to keep going, either the US MUST export to China, which is not happening, or EU and/or China must loan several times their own GDP to the third world, or the EU and/or China must massively increase their dollar holdings (which will, of course, inflate the Euro and Renminbi something awful whichever way it goes). But either WILL happen, because a crash will do that too. Which is what people mean when they say the worldwide system is on a crash course.
- someguyornotidk 3mo ago
  I don't think whether a country is an importer or an exporter matters at this point. This is likely going to develop into a matter of national security. Nations cannot allow most of their domestic industries to be destroyed. If the US doesn't reverse course soon, I think we'll start seeing large-scale closure of international markets to US companies very soon. Even with US retaliation, there is no other option.
  - mike_hearn 3mo ago
    Zero chance of that happening. Europe has already largely deindustrialized and it never closed itself to China. Europe also tried to stop buying Russian oil and failed due to transshipment through India. It's really sad seeing how little so many of us Europeans understand the situation. America and China hold all the cards, Europe holds none. It makes very little that is both unique and strategic. Decades of left wing economic policies are coming home to roost and there's no way to turn the ship around now.
HexPhantom 3mo ago
It feels less like a pure tech market now and more like cloud, semiconductors and defense policy all getting mixed together
- delta_p_delta_x 3mo ago
  Military-technological industrial complex. Has always been a thing. Nascent WW2 computers were used for artillery, rocket, and bomb guiding.
pythux 3mo ago
It might not be a coincidence that POTUS wrote yesterday on Truth Social that 100% tariffs would be imposed on any country proceeding with taxing US' digital services.
- chinathrow 3mo ago
  Pure grift.
- graemep 3mo ago
  Empty threat conditional on something that will never happen. Most of the rest of the world is too heavily dependent on US digital services to tax them more heavily. From social media to hyperscaler's clouds the US is dominant and stuff will just stop working if they get taxed. There would be a huge pushback from businesses if their government increased the cost of things like AWS. Edit: edit to say tax more heavily
  - masfuerte 3mo ago
    Eh? We already tax them. The UK is not alone in having a digital services tax.
    - graemep 3mo ago
      Sorry, meant tax more heavily. Uk's tax is 2% and limited to advertising and marketplace fees.
      - swarnie 3mo ago
        I'm happy to vote for anyone who can put an extra 0 on that, it would be nice for these companies to pay more tax than me one of these years....
        dlahoda 3mo ago
        They already pay. How 10usd subscriptions become 10eur or 10£? Companies pay lawyers and beurocrats and accountants to operate.
Chance-Device 3mo ago
Yes, this is exactly the implication. The decoupling of economies between those that have advanced AI, those who do not, and those who decide to ban AI outright or above a certain level of capacity.
mantas 3mo ago
The rest of the world already has quite a few restrictions.
_heimdall 3mo ago
This is far from a new challenge though. Another recent example, China has an advantage on cost of labor and manufacturing, and lack of enforcement of IP rights. They can produce for much cheaper than many other countries but it hasn't led to everyone banning trade with them.
- epolanski 3mo ago
  What part of China has cheap qualified labor? Skilled engineers nowadays demand between southern and central European prices at the very least.
  - chiply314 3mo ago
    Cheap qualified labor doing machining for example. They def make less than in europe. You make very good money for working at Volkswagen on the line. And China now also has software developers and even if they make the same amount, they are def also now a big player in the game and take parts of the cake.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - _heimdall 3mo ago
    What type of roles are you considering? Look into their manufacturing, for example. They make all kinds of heavy machineryat costs much lower than US prices, as far as I understand a big contributor is labor costs. Its also worth noting that st southern and central European labor costs they would still have an advantage over the US.
sajithdilshan 3mo ago
One would have to have leverage to put tariff on US and not worry about retaliation. Almost every country is tightly coupled with US, let it be trade or reliance on technology. I can only think of Russia that is decoupled from US at the moment and they are stuck with Putin that still lives with imperial mindset rather than actually being a rival to US
- bootsmann 3mo ago
  The US doesn’t have this leverage either, Trump is just uniquely willing to hurt his own country for his own idiosyncrasies. It is pretty established at this point that Americans were the most hurt by his tariffs.
deleted 3mo ago
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m3kw9 3mo ago
We don't need more fear mongering with AI, it already made a mess. Industries are not gonna fail, they fall behind, like how US doesn't share weapon tech or certain IP's. Plus you have China providing a close 2nd/3rd place LLM tech for free.
mrtksn 3mo ago
The incentive is that Americans are huge consumers and closing markets to US also means losing US markets, that's why Trump's taxation on Americans for imports(AKA tariffs) caused huge stir. That said, if the risk is not tolerable then it's not worth it and can be sacrificed. EU was fully on board to do that if Trump invaded Greenland and EU as rest of the world are aggressively diversifying. BTW EU will never have a "tech" industry in any meaningful size as long as US have access to EU markets, anyone who eventually got tech industry are those who blocked the US or were blocked by US. So if US keeps its course, in a few years we may end up with fragmented markets with US blocked out because the US is very unpopular but the current politicians everywhere including in the EU are very pro-US actually hoping that current situation is just a glitch, which is not aligned with what the general population demands and as a result the next elections they will align with anti-Americans.
outside1234 3mo ago
Worse, why would you ever take a dependency on a US company. Even China seems more trustworthy at this point.
varispeed 3mo ago
You are assuming that governments care and are not corrupt. I think they have very little room for manoeuvre - companies like AWS or Microsoft can simply you are too cocky and we will shutdown infrastructure your country is running on if you don't bend the knee.
_3u10 3mo ago
They don’t, they wouldn’t need tariffs if they did. America mostly produces cheaper ag commodities than the EU but more expensive than South America. Deepseek is already a better search engine than Google. (Not sure if it does Google searches) Travel the world it’s not American companies gaining market share. I would especially recommend trying Chinese AI or riding in a BYD car and judging for yourself.
WarmWash 3mo ago
Its utterly unsurprising that in the reckoning of pro-socialist society (work less, tax more, live easy), the failure of European industry over the last 30 years, utterly unsurprising that the knee-jerk reaction is "You need to share your labor with all of us" rather than "We need to get our shit together and build a competitor" Europe isn't cooked because it lacks talent, there are untold smart capable people there, it's cooked because it built a social allergy to the very thing it needs most.
Balgair 3mo ago
> The world needs to act quick before their industries fail. It's a cost problem. If you want to try for a SOTA model, you're going to need to spend big time. Germany spent ~$115B last year on it's defense, roughly 2% of it's GDP. In contrast, ~$145B was spent last year just on AI infrastructure by Meta, and, well no one talks about Meta winning any AI races.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
mmooss 3mo ago
> If US companies have a large unfair advantage The US companies with access have a large unfair advantage over other US companies. Imagine being Rivian if Tesla gets access, Rocket Lab or Blue Origin others if SpaceX gets access, most of SV if major tech companies get access, ... imagine being a startup.

grumple 3mo ago

Is the rest of the world really that dependent on emerging AI? I don’t think so. The US could cut off all foreign access to AI, nobody would notice.

basisword 3mo ago
It would definitely be a problem. A big one. Think of all the multi-national tech companies that have rolled out AI not only to their engineering teams but to their business teams now too. Suddenly your employees in the US can do more and do it quicker than your employees elsewhere. It would be a nightmare to try and manage.
- graemep 3mo ago
  That only applies to things Mythos does better than Opus. Mythos is supposedly very good at things such as finding vulnerabilities, but is it better at business tasks? IN the short time I had access to Fable it did not seem noticeably better at things I tried it for (lots of small tasks). Maybe it is better at vibe coding or finding security flaws, but at how much is it sufficiently better to be worth paying the extra?
  - basisword 3mo ago
    You're assuming this export restriction won't apply to any future models. The problem is a couple of years from now when the ROW is still on Opus and US workers are on something much better.
    - graemep 3mo ago
      Which would force us to use Chinese models instead. It would also increase the incentive for other countries to develop models.
- grumple 3mo ago
  I disagree. I work at a very large international corporation. How much revenue do you think we’ve seen due to AI? I’d guess it’s zero. I know for the groups whose finances I see, it’s zero. Yet costs have gone way up. There’s a bunch of new code, but not anything customers are going to pay more for. And either way no AI basically puts you back to where we were last year. US employees have always been far more productive, that’s nothing new.
  - basisword 3mo ago
    >> There’s a bunch of new code, but not anything customers are going to pay more for. This isn't an AI problem, it's a management issue. Why are you getting devs to build things that aren't going to generate revenue?
    - grumple 3mo ago
      Do you think the only bottleneck in dev has been the speed of coding? I think it’s obvious that this is not the case. It’s finding product market fit, actually discovering and deciding what must be built, and then selling it. And there’s a deeper economic reality: budgets for software are finite and limited, and already close to maxed for most consumers and businesses. If my customers can only afford $500/month total for software, no amount of software I make will push them past that. It’s not just us: where’s the revenue in the entire market? We can see all the public filings. There haven’t been any revenue gains. The only people making money from AI are the LLM providers. And even they are losing money. Even the biggest tech companies are limiting token spend. At best the tech is a new cost just to maintain parity, and I think most businesses look at it as a way to cut dev costs (trading for token spend). I think they will learn that it’s less of a win than they hoped. If a dev was spending 50% of their time coding, and you reduce that to 10% - that’s a big change but it isn’t really making you more because it’s all that time we hate in meetings, understanding customer needs, etc, that make us money.
      - Schiendelman 3mo ago
        A lot of the bottleneck is product management now. There's always near infinite work in every engineering team's backlog. Identifying the next few things to improve the product is hard work, with market investigation, competitive analysis, synthesizing user feedback... some of this gets faster with LLMs, certainly. I think most tech companies haven't figured out how to rebalance product to engineering to ensure engineering teams are doing work that grows the business funnel rather than expending tokens on other work.
sajithdilshan 3mo ago
Unless your country still use only analogue technology your country would definitely will be at the mercy of the country with AI superiority. Mythos showed how good it is at finding vulnerabilities and attack vectors for digital infrastructure. Imagine an attack on power grid which would result in a days long blackout in the middle of winter?
- Planktonne 3mo ago
  > your country would definitely will be at the mercy of the country with AI superiority People claim this, but it doesn't seem to be the case at all. We have multiple ongoing conflicts between countries currently, and we're not seeing huge gains from those with more access to AI.
  - sajithdilshan 3mo ago
    Mythos is relatively new and Antrophic has been fighting US government to not allow their models for warfare. However, it’s only a matter of time till they bend the knee and in next 5-10 years we’ll see the effects of that. Previously US used rebel groups to throw governments in other countries that are not US friendly. In the future I can see they can just start chaos by attacking banking systems, energy infrastructure or any other important modern infrastructure until that country falls in line with US
    - Planktonne 3mo ago
      That's all entirely science fiction though, until we see some actual evidence. If Mythos is so incredibly dangerous, then the models before should be at least a little dangerous, and we haven't seen that.
      - sajithdilshan 3mo ago
        > That's all entirely science fiction though Current AI was science fiction 5 years ago. But, you're entitled to your opinion, no matter how ignorant it is

spwa4 3mo ago

The US as a large-scale import nation and so does not need the rest of the world (except perhaps Europe, and only small parts) to keep its markets open to the US. Even in the European case, Europe would lose much more than the US would if they closed their markets. Plus, a lot of Europe is either very close to breaking point and unwilling to change (Italy), or rapidly worsening into a crash, and unwilling to change (France). It's Europe that is dependent on a large trade surplus with the rest of the world, financed by dollar loans to 3rd world countries. Now China is taking away their trade surplus, even directly (meaning Europe has a massive trade deficit to China), and indirectly (replacing demand for European goods, famously cars, everywhere). This is causing large-scale job losses in Europe as well as total disaster for government finances across the block, finances that were unhealthy to begin with. Now Europe and China are unwilling to lend to the rest of the world (because initially that would make very rich Europeans/the CCP a little bit poorer, by raising inflation quite a bit, thereby raising interest rates, which will move government finances from disaster to catastrophe), so if these money flows are to keep going, either the US MUST export to China, which is not happening, or EU and/or China must loan several times their own GDP to the third world, or the EU and/or China must massively increase their dollar holdings (which will, of course, inflate the Euro and Renminbi something awful whichever way it goes). But either WILL happen, because a crash will do that too. Which is what people mean when they say the worldwide system is on a crash course.

someguyornotidk 3mo ago
I don't think whether a country is an importer or an exporter matters at this point. This is likely going to develop into a matter of national security. Nations cannot allow most of their domestic industries to be destroyed. If the US doesn't reverse course soon, I think we'll start seeing large-scale closure of international markets to US companies very soon. Even with US retaliation, there is no other option.
- mike_hearn 3mo ago
  Zero chance of that happening. Europe has already largely deindustrialized and it never closed itself to China. Europe also tried to stop buying Russian oil and failed due to transshipment through India. It's really sad seeing how little so many of us Europeans understand the situation. America and China hold all the cards, Europe holds none. It makes very little that is both unique and strategic. Decades of left wing economic policies are coming home to roost and there's no way to turn the ship around now.

HexPhantom 3mo ago

It feels less like a pure tech market now and more like cloud, semiconductors and defense policy all getting mixed together

delta_p_delta_x 3mo ago
Military-technological industrial complex. Has always been a thing. Nascent WW2 computers were used for artillery, rocket, and bomb guiding.

pythux 3mo ago

It might not be a coincidence that POTUS wrote yesterday on Truth Social that 100% tariffs would be imposed on any country proceeding with taxing US' digital services.

chinathrow 3mo ago
Pure grift.
graemep 3mo ago
Empty threat conditional on something that will never happen. Most of the rest of the world is too heavily dependent on US digital services to tax them more heavily. From social media to hyperscaler's clouds the US is dominant and stuff will just stop working if they get taxed. There would be a huge pushback from businesses if their government increased the cost of things like AWS. Edit: edit to say tax more heavily
- masfuerte 3mo ago
  Eh? We already tax them. The UK is not alone in having a digital services tax.
  - graemep 3mo ago
    Sorry, meant tax more heavily. Uk's tax is 2% and limited to advertising and marketplace fees.
    - swarnie 3mo ago
      I'm happy to vote for anyone who can put an extra 0 on that, it would be nice for these companies to pay more tax than me one of these years....
      - dlahoda 3mo ago
        They already pay. How 10usd subscriptions become 10eur or 10£? Companies pay lawyers and beurocrats and accountants to operate.

Chance-Device 3mo ago

Yes, this is exactly the implication. The decoupling of economies between those that have advanced AI, those who do not, and those who decide to ban AI outright or above a certain level of capacity.

mantas 3mo ago

The rest of the world already has quite a few restrictions.

_heimdall 3mo ago

This is far from a new challenge though. Another recent example, China has an advantage on cost of labor and manufacturing, and lack of enforcement of IP rights. They can produce for much cheaper than many other countries but it hasn't led to everyone banning trade with them.

epolanski 3mo ago
What part of China has cheap qualified labor? Skilled engineers nowadays demand between southern and central European prices at the very least.
- chiply314 3mo ago
  Cheap qualified labor doing machining for example. They def make less than in europe. You make very good money for working at Volkswagen on the line. And China now also has software developers and even if they make the same amount, they are def also now a big player in the game and take parts of the cake.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- _heimdall 3mo ago
  What type of roles are you considering? Look into their manufacturing, for example. They make all kinds of heavy machineryat costs much lower than US prices, as far as I understand a big contributor is labor costs. Its also worth noting that st southern and central European labor costs they would still have an advantage over the US.

sajithdilshan 3mo ago

One would have to have leverage to put tariff on US and not worry about retaliation. Almost every country is tightly coupled with US, let it be trade or reliance on technology. I can only think of Russia that is decoupled from US at the moment and they are stuck with Putin that still lives with imperial mindset rather than actually being a rival to US

bootsmann 3mo ago
The US doesn’t have this leverage either, Trump is just uniquely willing to hurt his own country for his own idiosyncrasies. It is pretty established at this point that Americans were the most hurt by his tariffs.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

m3kw9 3mo ago

We don't need more fear mongering with AI, it already made a mess. Industries are not gonna fail, they fall behind, like how US doesn't share weapon tech or certain IP's. Plus you have China providing a close 2nd/3rd place LLM tech for free.

mrtksn 3mo ago

The incentive is that Americans are huge consumers and closing markets to US also means losing US markets, that's why Trump's taxation on Americans for imports(AKA tariffs) caused huge stir. That said, if the risk is not tolerable then it's not worth it and can be sacrificed. EU was fully on board to do that if Trump invaded Greenland and EU as rest of the world are aggressively diversifying. BTW EU will never have a "tech" industry in any meaningful size as long as US have access to EU markets, anyone who eventually got tech industry are those who blocked the US or were blocked by US. So if US keeps its course, in a few years we may end up with fragmented markets with US blocked out because the US is very unpopular but the current politicians everywhere including in the EU are very pro-US actually hoping that current situation is just a glitch, which is not aligned with what the general population demands and as a result the next elections they will align with anti-Americans.

outside1234 3mo ago

Worse, why would you ever take a dependency on a US company. Even China seems more trustworthy at this point.

varispeed 3mo ago

You are assuming that governments care and are not corrupt. I think they have very little room for manoeuvre - companies like AWS or Microsoft can simply you are too cocky and we will shutdown infrastructure your country is running on if you don't bend the knee.

_3u10 3mo ago

They don’t, they wouldn’t need tariffs if they did. America mostly produces cheaper ag commodities than the EU but more expensive than South America. Deepseek is already a better search engine than Google. (Not sure if it does Google searches) Travel the world it’s not American companies gaining market share. I would especially recommend trying Chinese AI or riding in a BYD car and judging for yourself.

WarmWash 3mo ago

Its utterly unsurprising that in the reckoning of pro-socialist society (work less, tax more, live easy), the failure of European industry over the last 30 years, utterly unsurprising that the knee-jerk reaction is "You need to share your labor with all of us" rather than "We need to get our shit together and build a competitor" Europe isn't cooked because it lacks talent, there are untold smart capable people there, it's cooked because it built a social allergy to the very thing it needs most.

Balgair 3mo ago

> The world needs to act quick before their industries fail. It's a cost problem. If you want to try for a SOTA model, you're going to need to spend big time. Germany spent ~$115B last year on it's defense, roughly 2% of it's GDP. In contrast, ~$145B was spent last year just on AI infrastructure by Meta, and, well no one talks about Meta winning any AI races.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

mmooss 3mo ago

> If US companies have a large unfair advantage The US companies with access have a large unfair advantage over other US companies. Imagine being Rivian if Tesla gets access, Rocket Lab or Blue Origin others if SpaceX gets access, most of SV if major tech companies get access, ... imagine being a startup.