10 ms·

Im not worried about this at all. The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... They're just accelerating the development of o

Im not worried about this at all. The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... They're just accelerating the development of open source models; and helping destroy the lead the US has built in AI, and their profit margins along with it. This is like the battle between PostgreSQL and Oracle all over. Move up market, isolate yourself to enterprises, and watch while everyone else builds on PostgreSQL and erodes any technical advantage you had, until people just stop talking about you altogether.

varispeed 3mo ago
That until it becomes illegal to have or use open source models without approval and licence from government. With more talks about on device scanning, this could be easily plumbed in. If OS detects there is open source model, it could brick your device or alert authorities. Then next step will be limiting what operating system you can install. Likely only those where you cannot remove client side scanning.
- Daishiman 3mo ago
  Not gonna happen; the incentives for bypassing this are too high.
- asadotzler 3mo ago
  It can't easily be plumbed in, though. I can spin up my own Linux build with none of that plumbing and do what I want with it. I can grab China's best models and use them or distilled versions on my own terms because OSS allows for that. Until hardware comes fully locked down and the models cannot be run on old hardware, both a long ways off, OSS is a way out.
  - utilize1808 3mo ago
    In the not so distant future, all your coding edits (for work anyway) will be through centralized gateways. Think remote desktop environment where pasting from the client is disabled.
    - varispeed 3mo ago
      Many workplaces already to this.
  - varispeed 3mo ago
    Politicians can act very quickly if there is good enough "incentive".
  - microgpt 3mo ago
    Linux will be an illegal operating system in 2027 because it doesn't do age verification.
    - anthk 3mo ago
      Good joke. The whole US industry would collapse before even destroying one of the main pillars of AWS, Google and whatnot. It would be funny if all the billion-sized corpos suing the judges en masse for trillions of dollars in losses. Lots of them would even ask for bodyguards because for sure the bribed ones would dissapear in really "weird" ways.
      - microgpt 3mo ago
        They'd just break the law with impunity, but you and I couldn't.
- kgeist 3mo ago
  I wonder how you can reliably detect an open source model though. It can be stored in any binary format, and the weights can be modified slightly so that the float values are completely different while the network works the same. The binary that runs it can be obfuscated as well. Maybe the hardware could detect common LLM inference patterns at runtime? That would probably produce many false positives.
  - grim_io 3mo ago
    You don't need a blacklist. Maintaining a blessed whitelist is the way to go.
  - notatoad 3mo ago
    You don’t need to detect it, you just need to incentivize employees and competitors to snitch on companies using unapproved models.
  - Larrikin 3mo ago
    It's been illegal forever to run a pirated copy of Windows or Photoshop. Even 30 years ago people weren't worried that their pirated copies would tattle on them, businesses did not use pirated copies because vendors would report them/not work on their systems, legal discovery could find them, etc and then they would get ridiculous fines. It's one thing to get a copy of "illegal" software and use it yourself. The stakes are basically zero and you almost certainly will not get caught It's a completely different thing to run a business on it with dozens of employees and requiring the employees to break the law to do their job.
    - microgpt 3mo ago
      Completely different to run a business on massive copyright infringement. A business like... OpenAI.
  - codedokode 3mo ago
    Antivirus companies have large expertise in this.
- blueblisters 3mo ago
  Eh probably easier ways to do this. Just sanction all entities that release open weight models for "illegal distillation". Enough to cross the risk threshold for most businesses in the west, and reduce future monetization opportunities.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  This is getting terrifying pretty quick...
LastTrain 3mo ago
> and their profit margins along with It lol that’s a good one.
utilize1808 3mo ago
The government will just claim that unsanctioned models have the potential to deliberately introduce security vulnerabilities when working on IT projects (e.g. be trained to strongly yet covertly favoring introducing compromised dependencies when you are not looking). Then laws will be made to forbid organizations who use models other than those from the sanctioned labs to participate in critical projects on national security concerns. All of a sudden, no business would risk using open source models anymore.
- pixelpoet 3mo ago
  Then all they do is drive the usage of open models underground (copyright infringement is illegal too, and still common), stifle US companies operating legally, and accelerate the rest of the world decoupling from the US. I hope they do it! It will have a positive long-term effect just like the Iran war footgun accelerates renewable energy transition.
  - utilize1808 3mo ago
    Have you seen legitimate corporates use cracked software? If you do, then your competitors will report you; your employees will blackmail you. The risk is too great.
    - microgpt 3mo ago
      I've seen "legitimate companies" commit piracy on a scale that well exceeds all cracked software piracy combined.
    - 0x3f 3mo ago
      This assumes the same reward ratio also continues, but that's not the case. A cutting edge LLM is something much more valuable than a cracked copy of Word. Just like the LLM providers themselves decided violating copyright was an acceptable risk, it entirely depends on how people see the tradeoffs, rather than being a categorical decision.
      - 3mo ago
dboreham 3mo ago
The battle was between Oracle and MySQL (and PostgreSQL won).
epolanski 3mo ago
Indeed, it's like people don't understand this is a cataclysm for US AI competitiveness. You cannot justify such a capex on AI anymore. This will drag down the us financial markets and economy too.
junto 3mo ago
Encryption is a better example. The USG tried exactly the same tactic in the 90’s. The NSA tried to shove the Clipper chip down everyone’s throats. The USG put export controls on encryption and people went as far as to tattoo the algorithms on their body. But like you said, they will try to control it and fail. Like they always do.
- epsteingpt 3mo ago
  I can't wait for the first person to tattoo model weights on their body!
  - hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
    Hmm, finally an honorable excuse to get really, really fat.
    - jqbd 3mo ago
      Prison Break Fat Edition
    - 4k93n2 3mo ago
      or just use a 4pt font and find a tattoo artist with a steady hand
rdbl27 3mo ago
I generally agree, but it's a bit overstated to say "nobody talks about Oracle now" -- they made a profit of about $17 billion dollars in 2025.
- OrangeDelonge 3mo ago
  Just goes to show how profitable rent seeking is even after you’ve become irrelevant.
nullbio 3mo ago
What is this Oracle you speak of? Never heard of it.
- aenis 3mo ago
  From what I recall they were big in the extortion business back in the day, and these days I think they are into construction or waste disposal, maybe both.
s3p 3mo ago
>The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... OpenAI and Anthropic did not call for the US Government to limit who Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 could be rolled out to.
- werrett 3mo ago
  > Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety Amodei. June 2026 https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential > We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology Amodei. June 2026 https://abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo-calls-stronger-regulation-ai/story?id=133753620 https://abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo-calls-s... > This is not to suggest that we won't need any regulation or safeguards. We obviously do, urgently, like we have for other powerful technologies Altman. Feb 2026 https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-openai-altman-world-urgently-ai.html https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-openai-altman-world-urge... > He gave several suggestions for how a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including "a combination of licensing and testing requirements" for AI companies, which he said could be used to regulate the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities". Altman. May 2023 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866 etc. etc.

varispeed 3mo ago

That until it becomes illegal to have or use open source models without approval and licence from government. With more talks about on device scanning, this could be easily plumbed in. If OS detects there is open source model, it could brick your device or alert authorities. Then next step will be limiting what operating system you can install. Likely only those where you cannot remove client side scanning.

Daishiman 3mo ago
Not gonna happen; the incentives for bypassing this are too high.
asadotzler 3mo ago
It can't easily be plumbed in, though. I can spin up my own Linux build with none of that plumbing and do what I want with it. I can grab China's best models and use them or distilled versions on my own terms because OSS allows for that. Until hardware comes fully locked down and the models cannot be run on old hardware, both a long ways off, OSS is a way out.
- utilize1808 3mo ago
  In the not so distant future, all your coding edits (for work anyway) will be through centralized gateways. Think remote desktop environment where pasting from the client is disabled.
  - varispeed 3mo ago
    Many workplaces already to this.
- varispeed 3mo ago
  Politicians can act very quickly if there is good enough "incentive".
- microgpt 3mo ago
  Linux will be an illegal operating system in 2027 because it doesn't do age verification.
  - anthk 3mo ago
    Good joke. The whole US industry would collapse before even destroying one of the main pillars of AWS, Google and whatnot. It would be funny if all the billion-sized corpos suing the judges en masse for trillions of dollars in losses. Lots of them would even ask for bodyguards because for sure the bribed ones would dissapear in really "weird" ways.
    - microgpt 3mo ago
      They'd just break the law with impunity, but you and I couldn't.
kgeist 3mo ago
I wonder how you can reliably detect an open source model though. It can be stored in any binary format, and the weights can be modified slightly so that the float values are completely different while the network works the same. The binary that runs it can be obfuscated as well. Maybe the hardware could detect common LLM inference patterns at runtime? That would probably produce many false positives.
- grim_io 3mo ago
  You don't need a blacklist. Maintaining a blessed whitelist is the way to go.
- notatoad 3mo ago
  You don’t need to detect it, you just need to incentivize employees and competitors to snitch on companies using unapproved models.
- Larrikin 3mo ago
  It's been illegal forever to run a pirated copy of Windows or Photoshop. Even 30 years ago people weren't worried that their pirated copies would tattle on them, businesses did not use pirated copies because vendors would report them/not work on their systems, legal discovery could find them, etc and then they would get ridiculous fines. It's one thing to get a copy of "illegal" software and use it yourself. The stakes are basically zero and you almost certainly will not get caught It's a completely different thing to run a business on it with dozens of employees and requiring the employees to break the law to do their job.
  - microgpt 3mo ago
    Completely different to run a business on massive copyright infringement. A business like... OpenAI.
- codedokode 3mo ago
  Antivirus companies have large expertise in this.
blueblisters 3mo ago
Eh probably easier ways to do this. Just sanction all entities that release open weight models for "illegal distillation". Enough to cross the risk threshold for most businesses in the west, and reduce future monetization opportunities.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
matheusmoreira 3mo ago
This is getting terrifying pretty quick...

LastTrain 3mo ago

> and their profit margins along with It lol that’s a good one.

utilize1808 3mo ago

The government will just claim that unsanctioned models have the potential to deliberately introduce security vulnerabilities when working on IT projects (e.g. be trained to strongly yet covertly favoring introducing compromised dependencies when you are not looking). Then laws will be made to forbid organizations who use models other than those from the sanctioned labs to participate in critical projects on national security concerns. All of a sudden, no business would risk using open source models anymore.

pixelpoet 3mo ago
Then all they do is drive the usage of open models underground (copyright infringement is illegal too, and still common), stifle US companies operating legally, and accelerate the rest of the world decoupling from the US. I hope they do it! It will have a positive long-term effect just like the Iran war footgun accelerates renewable energy transition.
- utilize1808 3mo ago
  Have you seen legitimate corporates use cracked software? If you do, then your competitors will report you; your employees will blackmail you. The risk is too great.
  - microgpt 3mo ago
    I've seen "legitimate companies" commit piracy on a scale that well exceeds all cracked software piracy combined.
  - 0x3f 3mo ago
    This assumes the same reward ratio also continues, but that's not the case. A cutting edge LLM is something much more valuable than a cracked copy of Word. Just like the LLM providers themselves decided violating copyright was an acceptable risk, it entirely depends on how people see the tradeoffs, rather than being a categorical decision.
    - 3mo ago

dboreham 3mo ago

The battle was between Oracle and MySQL (and PostgreSQL won).

epolanski 3mo ago

Indeed, it's like people don't understand this is a cataclysm for US AI competitiveness. You cannot justify such a capex on AI anymore. This will drag down the us financial markets and economy too.

junto 3mo ago

Encryption is a better example. The USG tried exactly the same tactic in the 90’s. The NSA tried to shove the Clipper chip down everyone’s throats. The USG put export controls on encryption and people went as far as to tattoo the algorithms on their body. But like you said, they will try to control it and fail. Like they always do.

epsteingpt 3mo ago
I can't wait for the first person to tattoo model weights on their body!
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
  Hmm, finally an honorable excuse to get really, really fat.
  - jqbd 3mo ago
    Prison Break Fat Edition
  - 4k93n2 3mo ago
    or just use a 4pt font and find a tattoo artist with a steady hand

rdbl27 3mo ago

I generally agree, but it's a bit overstated to say "nobody talks about Oracle now" -- they made a profit of about $17 billion dollars in 2025.

OrangeDelonge 3mo ago
Just goes to show how profitable rent seeking is even after you’ve become irrelevant.

nullbio 3mo ago

What is this Oracle you speak of? Never heard of it.

aenis 3mo ago
From what I recall they were big in the extortion business back in the day, and these days I think they are into construction or waste disposal, maybe both.

s3p 3mo ago

>The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... OpenAI and Anthropic did not call for the US Government to limit who Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 could be rolled out to.

werrett 3mo ago
> Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety Amodei. June 2026 https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential > We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology Amodei. June 2026 https://abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo-calls-stronger-regulation-ai/story?id=133753620 https://abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo-calls-s... > This is not to suggest that we won't need any regulation or safeguards. We obviously do, urgently, like we have for other powerful technologies Altman. Feb 2026 https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-openai-altman-world-urgently-ai.html https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-openai-altman-world-urge... > He gave several suggestions for how a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including "a combination of licensing and testing requirements" for AI companies, which he said could be used to regulate the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities". Altman. May 2023 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866 etc. etc.