3 ms·

Updating restrictions of sales to unsupported regions

34 points by yurivish 1y ago

bethekidyouwant 1y ago
The Chinese who famously don’t have vpns…
g42gregory 1y ago
I have a feeling that China will be OK. Wouldn't these restriction protect the native LLM ecosystem and will give them room and revenues to grow? Strong internal-only competition will still make them competitive.
- miohtama 1y ago
  China can train on pirated books all day long, unlike Anthropic or other Western competitors
Gathering6678 1y ago
My understanding is Anthropic is closed source and has been unavailable for Chinese companies for a long time, and if they wanted to use offshore entities to use closed-source LLMs, they would have gone to OpenAI...?
- yorwba 1y ago
  People who work at Alibaba (yes, the same company that released Qwen weights for free) told me that they were given access to Claude. (In a restricted environment that I presume is intended to prevent leaking too much of Alibaba's code to Anthropic.)
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
And people complain the TSA is "security theater"... Yeah, I'm sure whatever restrictions they put in place will make it so hard for Chinese entities to access their APIs. This is simply an attempt by Anthropic to pretend to play nice with the current administration (and to be clear, I don't blame them - let's just not pretend that this actually prevents China getting access to Anthropic).
throwaway22032 1y ago
So what is stopping anyone in principle just reselling API access through a middleman? Should I set up the company now and rake in the billions?
- notpushkin 1y ago
  I think you’ll get banned a few millions in.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > I think you’ll get banned a few millions in. So? I'll still have those few millions.[1] Besides, how will they know? Creating a new proxy account for every real account would make it almost impossible for Anthropic to know that someone is coming from China, only that some set of accounts (say, 100k) are coming in from a small set of IPs, but they're still paid accounts! ================ [1] The idea is probably DoA for other reasons, such as why would someone proxy through you when they can use a VPN. Or openrouter.
    - john-h-k 1y ago
      > So? I'll still have those few millions.[1] You almost certainly agree when paying for Anthropic not to do this, so they’ll sue you for those few million
    - notpushkin 1y ago
      Yeah, sorry, that was a joke :-) In addition to Openrouter, I think big users from China can fairly easily set up a company in Singapore or something (to get volume discounts, perhaps).
Syzygies 1y ago
Alas there was no way to pause my $200 Max subscription while I'm in China for two weeks...
cantrevealname 1y ago
The 20 countries that Anthropic won't do business with: Afghanistan Belarus Central African Republic China Congo, Democratic Republic of Cuba Eritrea Ethiopia Iran Libya Mali Myanmar Nicaragua North Korea Russia Somalia Sudan Syria Venezuela Yemen I took their list here[1] and diff'ed it with Wikipedia's list of sovereign states. They don't accept the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the Republic of Congo is OK. There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one. Anthropic is fine with Taiwan. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries (They give two lists, one for API and another for Claude.ai, but the lists are identical.)
- notpushkin 1y ago
  > There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one. Similar to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and People’s Republic of China, hmm.
  - cantrevealname 1y ago
    Before the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany, the communist side, was the German Democratic Republic. (West Germany was the Federal Republic of Germany.)
kouteiheika 1y ago
> including adversarial nations like China—continue accessing our services in various ways [...] our commitment to ensuring that transformative AI capabilities advance democratic interests Ah, right, China, the only country which actually releases open weight frontier models. Anthropic definitely doesn't want Chinese companies to use their APIs because of their commitment to "advance democratic interests", and not because they want to prevent them from distilling their models and releasing them for free for everyone to use. Definitely. Fortunately since this use case is already breaking the TOS I doubt any extra legal maneuvering is going to stop anyone.

34 points by yurivish 1y ago

The Chinese who famously don’t have vpns…

I have a feeling that China will be OK. Wouldn't these restriction protect the native LLM ecosystem and will give them room and revenues to grow? Strong internal-only competition will still make them competitive.

miohtama 1y ago
China can train on pirated books all day long, unlike Anthropic or other Western competitors

Gathering6678 1y ago

My understanding is Anthropic is closed source and has been unavailable for Chinese companies for a long time, and if they wanted to use offshore entities to use closed-source LLMs, they would have gone to OpenAI...?

yorwba 1y ago
People who work at Alibaba (yes, the same company that released Qwen weights for free) told me that they were given access to Claude. (In a restricted environment that I presume is intended to prevent leaking too much of Alibaba's code to Anthropic.)

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

And people complain the TSA is "security theater"... Yeah, I'm sure whatever restrictions they put in place will make it so hard for Chinese entities to access their APIs. This is simply an attempt by Anthropic to pretend to play nice with the current administration (and to be clear, I don't blame them - let's just not pretend that this actually prevents China getting access to Anthropic).

throwaway22032 1y ago

So what is stopping anyone in principle just reselling API access through a middleman? Should I set up the company now and rake in the billions?

notpushkin 1y ago
I think you’ll get banned a few millions in.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > I think you’ll get banned a few millions in. So? I'll still have those few millions.[1] Besides, how will they know? Creating a new proxy account for every real account would make it almost impossible for Anthropic to know that someone is coming from China, only that some set of accounts (say, 100k) are coming in from a small set of IPs, but they're still paid accounts! ================ [1] The idea is probably DoA for other reasons, such as why would someone proxy through you when they can use a VPN. Or openrouter.
  - john-h-k 1y ago
    > So? I'll still have those few millions.[1] You almost certainly agree when paying for Anthropic not to do this, so they’ll sue you for those few million
  - notpushkin 1y ago
    Yeah, sorry, that was a joke :-) In addition to Openrouter, I think big users from China can fairly easily set up a company in Singapore or something (to get volume discounts, perhaps).

Syzygies 1y ago

Alas there was no way to pause my $200 Max subscription while I'm in China for two weeks...

cantrevealname 1y ago

The 20 countries that Anthropic won't do business with: Afghanistan Belarus Central African Republic China Congo, Democratic Republic of Cuba Eritrea Ethiopia Iran Libya Mali Myanmar Nicaragua North Korea Russia Somalia Sudan Syria Venezuela Yemen I took their list here[1] and diff'ed it with Wikipedia's list of sovereign states. They don't accept the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the Republic of Congo is OK. There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one. Anthropic is fine with Taiwan. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries (They give two lists, one for API and another for Claude.ai, but the lists are identical.)

notpushkin 1y ago
> There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one. Similar to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and People’s Republic of China, hmm.
- cantrevealname 1y ago
  Before the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany, the communist side, was the German Democratic Republic. (West Germany was the Federal Republic of Germany.)

kouteiheika 1y ago

> including adversarial nations like China—continue accessing our services in various ways [...] our commitment to ensuring that transformative AI capabilities advance democratic interests Ah, right, China, the only country which actually releases open weight frontier models. Anthropic definitely doesn't want Chinese companies to use their APIs because of their commitment to "advance democratic interests", and not because they want to prevent them from distilling their models and releasing them for free for everyone to use. Definitely. Fortunately since this use case is already breaking the TOS I doubt any extra legal maneuvering is going to stop anyone.