3 ms·
Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models? Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open
by zarzavat 3mo ago
Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models?
Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to play.
- ianm218 3mo agoThe government can strong arm enterprises in a million ways. If they just issue a vague executive order large public companies won't want to buy inference from these models without regulatory certainty. Anyone in regulated industries is going to be weary of regulatory retaliation. I.e. for Google to build data centers they need the US gov to play ball, so if they were considering a service of hosting open source models on their TPUs they wouldn't do this. Another example is the merger between Paramount and Skydance where they paid out Trump to get the merger approved [1]. [1]. https://www.yahoo.com/news/paramount-settles-donald-trump-lawsuit-042610094.html?guccounter=1 https://www.yahoo.com/news/paramount-settles-donald-trump-la...
- satvikpendem 3mo agoThe US is trying to stop them for US companies, it doesn't care about non Americans.
- monooso 3mo agoThe parent comment, emphasis mine. > Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US.
- marmarama 3mo agoSure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally. And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe. This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.
- zarzavat 3mo agoThis might work if Chinese models are on par with US models or slightly worse. However if Chinese models start to become noticeably better[0] than US models, it will be hard to hold the line and businesses would start risking using illegal models to get an business advantage, which would be as simple as making HTTP requests to an inference provider outside the US. The AI companies themselves show that there's a high capacity for lawlessness in corporate America, such as e.g. Meta and Anthropic downloading Library Genesis and getting away with a slap on the wrist. [0] Chinese models exceeding US models could come sooner rather than later. Stock Kimi K3 is slightly worse than the frontier but it could improve with further post-training, and the weights will be released imminently. All it takes is for China to get a good pretrain and release that model into the world.
- cloakandswagger 3mo agoUS banks would be prohibited from processing payments for those model providers, and those model providers would update their EULAs to prohibit American-usage. Look at how online poker was "banned" in 2011. It was and always has been legal to play online poker in the US, they just made it illegal to accept wire payments for online gambling which destroyed the American market for it. So many comments in this thread miss the point; an American "ban" on Chinese open-weights is not aiming to make individual usage impossible and wouldn't be accomplished by throwing people in jail. The point is to make their usage difficult and uncertain enough that large companies will opt for American alternatives.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoNo they cannot, legally speaking, and companies do not want to face sanctions avoidance charges, so practically speaking no American company will touch the European model hosts either.
- pbgcp2026 3mo agoIn 5 to 10 years most of EU will be partnering with China, not US. Banking will become more "Chinese centric" and most of EU will show a middle finger to US with its FATCA, DMCAs, sanctions and other BS.
- andix 3mo agoJust declare it illegal (national security risks). Treat it like sexual abuse material, scan cloud services for copies, and jail everyone who has them.
- claw-el 3mo agoHave you seen my latest model, called HLM, from y.ai, there is one single model weight that is different from the popular open source model, but I promise you it is no longer the same thing..
- syradar 3mo agoThat wouldn’t hold up in court and you would be jailed. Your intent is still to provide the illegal model.
- Buttons840 3mo agoThe actual way to do this is run a few fine-tuning passes on some pro-America nationalistic freedom loving anti-China propaganda, and then you can tell the judge with a straight face that it's a new model.
- SamuelAdams 3mo agoYou jest but this is exactly how Anna’s Archive was set up. Anyone can copy the infrastructure code’s git repository and set up a mirror of the site and trackers under a new domain relatively quickly. Maybe a similar setup can be done for banned AI weights?
- mft_ 3mo agoYes. It feels like we're heading into a dystopian Neal Stephenson novel - there will be a grey market trade in custom models with different specialisations, which people slot into their hacked-together hardware to help with different tasks.
- andix 3mo ago
- dmuso 3mo agoProbably in a similar way to how they go after IP/copyright currently. One method they use is to push for law changes in free trade agreements. US would use whatever leverage they have to get other countries on board and locked in to US providers.
- surajama 3mo agoThat might stop European companies from buying inference directly from China. I don’t see how anyone could possibly stop them from taking an open-weight Chinese model and then modifying it and selling it to Americans as a European model.
- mft_ 3mo agoIt would become known and be blocked. You think if the EU started rebadging and reexporting Chinese EVs to the US the EU tariff wouldn't jumt up to the Chinese level very quickly?
- e44858 3mo agoHow can you prove that a modified LLM was based on a Chinese model?
- mft_ 3mo agoIANA AI researcher, but there are different technique for fingerprinting or assessing the similarity of different LLM models. Or it could become known via a leak, or good old humint. If it wanted to, the US could make model inspection (with direct access to the weights) a condition of access to their market.
- sharpshadow 3mo agoThe US will stop you from using it with sanctions. As a US citizen anywhere in the world intentionally circumventing sanctions grant you up to 20 years prison time. That’s just the short version not to speak of secondary sanctions and further mechanisms which take place then.
- Buttons840 3mo agoWon't EU companies just announce they've "developed" a new model named Komo, and then we can just use that? Or is the US just going to straight up prosecute plebs for using any model not owned by one of the 5 Americans?
- skrebbel 3mo agoI'm partial to their proud 100% European competitor Doopsook
- dosisking 3mo agoCompanies would simply move away from the US. Kind of like how Britain killed it's own car industry back in the day.