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I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?

1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models?

2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway

3. it’s not stopping distillation either, Chinese labs are already banned from using US frontier models and look at how good that is working

I don’t get it. Am I missing something? The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore, and should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return? In any case this would be something benefitting only a very few for a short time (labs + investors).

Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking American providers by distilling. The real aim is to eliminate competition because otherwise Anthropic and OpenAI are non viable and the US views them as crucial for winning the 'AI race' which they see as putting whoever wins it on top in terms of warfare/economic power etc.

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

This is exactly it.

Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (without a complicated process) because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands that our domestic brands couldn't compete and lobbied to keep them out.

> should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return?

It just has to last until the next quarter / fundraising round.

You're not seeing it because you're thinking in terms of internal US economics, but this is a question about international economics and geopolitical leverage in the distant future.

The reason to consider the ban is because it might be the only way to preserve a fully autonomous and independent American frontier AI stack and the long-term strategic value of possessing such a stack could vastly outweigh the cost of giving up true free market competition on AI. If giving US startups and other companies access to cheaper Chinese AI means sacrificing the US's ability to own its own frontier AI stack, is that a rational trade, or would it severely and irrecoverably sacrifice the country's technological autonomy and leverage for decades to come in exchange for cheaper tokens for a little bit early on?

If the US not only gives up most of its manufacturing capability to China, but also allows itself to give up its own AI stack and become almost entirely dependent on foreign AI, then it's conceivable the combination of the two sacrifices will deal a permanent deathblow to the country in exchange for what will turn out to have been a couple decades of cheap goods and AI tokens.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term.

> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

But you did see it.

The US has invested trillions in AI that the companies involved are never going to make back. Even without competition from open models, but definitely not with it. And if those trillions turn out to be worthless, that's going to have a massive impact on the market and cause a lot of bankruptcies.

Banning those open weight models isn't going to fix everything, but it would the impossible obstacle slightly smaller.

You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.
> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term

It won't even do this. Streisand effect will probably draw even more attention to the open weight models

The entire marketing narrative in AI already operates this way --- "GPT 2.0 is too dangerous to release, oh noooo!" etc

The CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.
it's simple.

AI labs and investors are scared, and pushing administration to ban them, because they can't compete with Chinese models soon, similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.

When there is cheaper alternative, companies might go with self hosting option, which reduces the enterprise moat of AI labs

How would it even be stopped if you could ban it? It's not like you're banning just one company. Anyone with the resources can still obtain and run the models. Sure, big models like Kimi K3 will be less accessible until a foreign version of Openrouter with no incentive to listen to US law begins offering it. Or they offer it and obfuscate what model it actually is behind codenames.

It wouldn't surprise me if that kind of problem is partially why weights are open. Because you can't meaningfully stomp them out completely.

They argue that the Chinese models distill US models as one of the basis of the potential ban. I think it's quite ironic considering even the US models themselves are using data out there on the internet without asking for permissions and in many cases even infringing copyrights...
Proprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses.

I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.

Read this thread when you get the time:

https://x.com/_vkaku/status/2080352797606744209

Open Data+Open Models gives everyone else an advantage and bringing regulatory capture here should be appealed and brought to the FTC and the courts to challenge such regulations.

Startups need better than this whole lock down into four overvalued frontier models in the US sort of thing

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.

You guys need to wake up and realize that Anthropic are the enemy. They just increased their political spending as well... Stop giving them your money or this never ends.
If there were ever a sign I need to get mirroring, this is it.

What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: <16GB, <32GB, <96, <256, 256+

Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc

But the idea of a blanket ban on Chinese open-weight models was not seriously discussed.

Article should probably put the above higher in the story.

Blocking Chinese models would just be regulatory capture by another name. If we want OpenAI and Anthropic to improve they need to compete not just with eachother but with foreign labs too.

I don’t know why anyone would think giving Mango Mussolini the power to decide what AI models they can use is a good idea.

You don't need an archive of huggingface. Instead you can use the Chinese version of huggingface with all Chinese models - https://www.modelscope.ai/models
The point of open weight models is that this is not possible, companies will be built by taking 'contraband' chinese open weight models and marketing as something from the US
This is such a fundamentally misguided policy. The real competition isn't where the models are today. It's where the innovation will be tomorrow and what that should look like.

Trying to protect existing incumbents by banning Chinese open weight models is only going to stack the deck further in favour of Open AI and Anthropic. The real edge that the United States had was never excelling in the here and now. It was in being one step ahead in figuring out what the 'next big thing' was going to be. Propping up a duopoly that squeezes out all other competitors is the very opposite of that.

Software and technology is probably the last bastion where the United States still has somewhat of an ability to out-compete the Chinese. Our lead in this area came from allowing upstarts and innovators to kill off and replace the fossilized incumbents, not by propping up the big shots.

I am genuinely bewildered as to why we would be hell-bent on destroying that advantage.

Don't model weights fall under free speech?
Remember when OpenAI were wise enough to know OpenAI should be…open?

Greed will cost America the entire AI market at this rate

Even more bizarre than debating over whether we can stop the free flow of information across communications surfaces (we can't)... is the notion that this one person - a highly ineffectual occupant of an office whose relevance is rapidly decreasing... is somehow in charge of it.
The letter really dances around the issue that we don’t want to see a ban on the release and use of open weights foreign or domestic models in the US. If we do it will leave us at a severe competitive disadvantage in a global context. Many of us would consider moving our businesses out of the US to avoid being mired in a stagnant pond that reeks of government capture by a handful of corrupt laggards whose core competency is regulating away competition and killing domestic innovation.
I think this would be foolish, a more sound strategy is to focus on critical infrastructure and defense not using models that are "open" but they're really just binary blobs. We have models here in the states like OLMo that could receive more investing to attempt to bring them up to par with some of the frontier open-weight models, removing a lot of these concerns.
Living outside of the US (and EU). I’m in the process of launching an agent assisted automated pentesting and authorized offensive security service. I’m using open weights models to execute the entire audit. So lets for a moment entertain the idea that the US somehow locks open weights. How are they going to stop such audits or actual attackers? A competing service in the US simple won’t be able to execute the same level of audits because many of the models refuse following penetration and offensive security testing instructions. An actual attacker is not going to limit itself to those models either. Why would anyone serious about security then limit itself too.

In the end, as a non-US entity; how would the US even stop me from providing services to US companies in private? Well I have a US LLC now, but the moment they become serious about this it takes me a few weeks to incorporate in HK or SG.

Didn't Hugging Face have to resort to the Chinese open weight GLM model to figure out that an OpenAI was hacking it?
I think that we humans still have a really tough time differentiating and classifying between public and private goods (and everything in between) from an economic sense.

Unfortunately, capitalism of today appears to find public goods and strong, public, healthy public goods to be undesirable investments. Yet, it seems inevitable that some things trend that direction.

I feel if we could get a better handle on what goods fall into which category, and find ways to make those things sustainable and even grow, the situation could get better.

I'm speaking purely from observations here but it also looks like in some ways, the "invisible hand of the economy" (i.e. Adam Smith) might sort these things out by itself, albeit, painfully.

We could look at the fact that LLMs were mostly created from the public domain (except when they were not), and the resulting products/services (expensive to create/operate, benefits a huge swath of humanity, has all kinds of externality issues) as something that perhaps should again almost be considered as a public good.

If we look at the struggles LLM/AI companies have had with legal structure choices, such as nonprofit, for profit, etc and pricing (e.g. do we make it accessible at a loss? Do we extract huge profits?) as a kind of moral dilemma of classifying this new economic good (LLM-based AI).

In the US, the government has been taking investment interests in some tech companies, and recent proposals even include establishing sovereign wealth funds around AI/LLM. I think this is further evidence that the system is trying to figure out how to classify these new economic goods and corporations.

Would it even be possible to ban open weight models, given all the ways they can be used in finetuned models or online services, also in 3rd countries?
Besides serving no purpose other than an attempt to enforce software by fiat (which would hurt legitimate business, make US AI companies noncompetitive, and do nothing to stop illegitimate use)... it's literally impossible to enforce.

There's a million loopholes (secret distillation so it's no longer foreign, serving mystery model from different jurisdiction, putting it in your basement and not telling anyone). And you bet the motivation and money is there to jump through these hoops.

Oh man, if you weren't sure if the administration is staffed with people who do not understand the technology they are trying to manage, doubt no more!

From the article...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday on Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria” that the administration would investigate whether Chinese artificial intelligence companies had improperly distilled American models to power their own, saying that the U.S. can “sanction” companies that engage in intellectual property theft.

most startup founders can't suck trump's dick with enough money to make him give a shit about their needs. Society gets what it allows.
I kind of buy that Chinese models should only be usable via western hosts, but completely shutting them off would be a massive self own.
side note : I wish they had an actual link to the companies instead of just their names in https://littletech.org/membership
As bad as it will be no one will be surprised when this happens. This administration does not care about the law. The president wants to keep using his position to make a generational bag. This is the same leader of the free world peddling shitcoin.

Everyone knows the game someone is going to cut him a check and suddenly the Chinese models are going to be a national security threat. The only saving grace may be that when it comes to China the president has shown himself to be a paper tiger.

The way he waddled around Zhongnanhai after embarrassing himself in the trade war and the Iran war was truly something. For whatever reason, Xi (like Putin) has him scared. But if enough sinophobes with deep pockets cut a check, it will not be surprising. It may even benefit China to watch the United States continue to attempt closing itself off instead of competing.

One question here: Why you don't see a lot of good American open weight models on the market? I'm guess it's about money? Could there be ways to lower that cost? Sharing idle GPUs through network (like Folding@home, BOINC), open and fair market for training data, open source training framework, and such?

This whole Chinese AI thing makes me giggle at these American AI companies, but the ultimate solution/long-term goal is still to make the technology universal. I don't think China alone can make it happen.

Also, if Americans can too offer open weight models, that could change the logic of their laws, making it more open rather than protective.

Banning Chinese open source AI is “quick war with Iran” levels of strategic thinking.
I think distillation is inevitable and pretty hard to prevent but I also dunno why anyone would spend billions to train frontier models if there's enough distillation going on to get near it with much lower spend.
I tell everyone whenever I get a chance, download any open weights models you can as soon as possible.

Buy extra hardrives. Borrow them. Do whatever you have to do.

But to paraphrase Éomer, don't trust to hope, it has abandoned these lands.

People want to get from A to B. Someone makes a rule to stop them. So they go from A to C to B instead — or settle for something close enough to B.

The rule-makers don't stop anyone, and often the end state is worse than before the rule existed. This happens constantly with tech and the laws that try to contain it.

Tech is like reality: there are endless routes to roughly the same destination, and rules are slow. The asymmetry is the whole problem — you only need to find one new route; they have to block every possible one.

So Y Combinator signed it too? But this is HN, Y combinator website. I think I am missing something because I never read any opinion like 'we should ban Chinese models'.
We must all hoard all available models before they get taken down. Is anyone archiving huggingface?
Why jump to complex technical and policy solutions when an Open Weights AI champion trophy, in solid gold, is being requested by the Commander in Thief?
What happened to free trade and globalisation? Oooohhh only when it serves the west. What happened to the invisible hand of the market? Oooohhh it only when it serves the west.

Well damn that the Chinese are playing the game “capitalism” better than the west.

The last time this happen, the west just forced opium on China. Ironically it was the west that forced China to open its markets in the first place.

History just keeps repeating like a broken record.

Note that a ban doesn't mean you can't download it anymore. Just that if you do so it will be considered illegal.

A competitor can simply accuse you of using a chinese model and throw you completely off rails with an investigation. Or when the government can't get a valid search warrant for a separate crime, they can get you on suspicion if using a chinese model.

this would actually be big win for non US founders
The whole article is very well summarized in these two lines :American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide, and I beleive Not only US but Europe and all around the Globe we should have same pursuit.