Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them.
AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.
How does that even work? If Z.ai wants to buy lets say GPUs for AI training, what's stopping them from going to a local reseller? Its not even circumventing the rules, its the natural thing to do.
For that matter, does (only) NVIDIA make datacenter cards? When I buy a gaming card, I dont buy from NVIDIA, I buy from an integrator, like Gigabyte, who work with a company like Foxconn to make the cards.
The export restrictions only apply to certain GPU models, which are the more recent powerful ones used for training tasks. So the H100, B100 etc. are banned along with 4090, 5090.
Nvidia has downgraded chips that aren’t banned. H100 is banned, H800 is allowed. A100 is banned, A800 is allowed. But the sale has a tariff attached.
That’s all how it’s supposed to work. In practice companies probably circumvent the restrictions.
The GamersNexus documentary (https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI) on the semi-underground GPU trade in China, while a little amateurish in terms of depth and general atmosphere, is an interesting watch and may answer some of your questions.
Basically, those export controls make GPUs more expensive for affected parties in China, but don't effectively stop them from being acquired or used over there.
What's the publicly stated/marketing reason for capitalist America to put companies on the Entity List? Genuinely asking. Because to me it screams 'we were only for the free market until there was no competition'
Free Market vs. planned economy was always mostly talking points, not a consistent ideology imo.
Even during the Cold War, American farms were heavily subsidized. The abundant supermarkets were not a product of free markets, they were a propaganda piece.
Today the US is pretty far from being a free market. Tax deductions are subsidies. Industry subsidies fund things on the front end, and bailouts are essentially subsidies after the fact.
And on top of that there are plenty of (good and bad) regulations which distort the market. For example it is illegal to import foreign insulin even if it would be cheaper. In most parts of US metro areas it is illegal to build multifamily housing.
DeepSeek rose to fame through stolen IP from U.S., and created shell companies to bypass U.S. law. Typical CCP-inspired behavior. The free world needs protection from abusers.
I'm sure there's a ton of other abuses they've committed as they race to become China's preferred LLM.
Free markets generally only make sense when at the same scope of the ruling government. When country A can manipulate markets in ways that country B can't or won't, eventually country B will attempt to make trade rules that level the playing field.
Its also worth noting we don't really have free markets in the US anyway.
The common thread here is that it is China. Before the 2010s and earlier, the US wasn't so concerned about China, but ever since then, China has been a big US concern for it being a technology and military rival
e.g. the Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security
Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications
Companies Huawei and ZTE report from 2012:
From that point forward, that concern has only grown. So you can view these actions as screaming "we were only for the free market until there was no competition" but if you want to genuinely know the answer to your question, the publicly stated concern is "China is a national security threat"
"First published in 1997 to inform the public on entities involved in disseminating weapons of mass destruction, the list has since expanded to include entities that engaged in "activities sanctioned by the State Department and activities contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests"
So RAM chip makers when there's a RAM shortage must be 'contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests' i.e. the US government is trying to squeeze its citizens on RAM prices.
> Other way around according to what GGP quoted, this would get RAM into the US but not out, reducing prices.
Only in a world where the other party has no agency. In real life the other party raises prices on their exports to compensate for the supply chain disruption and they still get the items.
Ultimately the consumer pays more, the extra goes the government, and the net impact is just obfuscated taxation and a reduction in both supply and demand that's bad for the economy and other living things.
> What's the publicly stated/marketing reason for capitalist America to put companies on the Entity List?
“Capitalism” is (as a result of propaganda by its defenders after it was named and accurately described by its socialist critics) often mistaken for a dedication to free trade, but capitalism is a regime characterized first and foremost by society being organized around the interests of the capital-holding class, the first of which is the preservation of the situation in which society is organized around the interests of that class. The reasons companies are put on the Entity List is because they are broadly seen as a threat (long-term or immediate) to the continuation of that regime. That’s what the “foreign policy and national security interests” that form the official basis of the Entity List ultimately, generally, boil down to, in one way or another.
(They don’t always boil down to that, because why the US is basically a capitalist system, it is not purely one, and even in a more pure capitalist regime, individual influential decision-makers may have other interests that they act on besides the implementation and preservation of capitalism that end up getting reflected in policy.)
that is open to debate. Any commercial activity with a sanctioned entity has a pretty broad interpretation. Companies might not want to take the chance even if they are "still allowed".
> except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway,
those export restrictions are a joke. when they were introduced, there was a sudden spike in NVIDIA GPU exports to surrounding Asian countries. and the US government knows this
CXMT memory maker will not be banned, because US AI labs are salivating at the idea of more RAM supply, and are lobbying hard to prevent restrictions
There is no single "it", the Singapore loophole is well known, and nothing has been done about it. Except by China, once , when it blocked the sale of Manus to Meta, even though on paper, Manus is a Singaporean enterprise.
If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
It's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"
Perhaps the question should instead be "Why are these Western AI companies getting insane valuations on dubious ROI, and how can these Chinese models run on a fraction of the infrastructure?"
Not saying you're doing this specifically, but I'd be careful with thinking that "company" in China means the same as "company" in America (or in the West more generally).
True, Industrial Policy [0] is much bigger over there.
Although one might also say "was", depending on what you think the Republican party of big-government decides to nationalize [1][2] or command [3] next.
That doesn't make any sense. If the cost is training, the cost is compute, not data. Distilling another model means paying for that model, which isn't obviously less expensive than crawling the web and curating a dataset. Regardless of where your data comes from, the training process costs the same.
>"Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"
I feel like that is way over simplified. I do not trust the American government. I do not trust the Chinese government. As an American, I believe the Chinese government has a longer and broader history of stealing intellectual property and far less checks and balances than the American government. The current American administration will be gone soon and maybe we can get some sanity back at some point. Overall, I trust my data in America more than China and I think that's reasonable. I am not naive. I'm aware of all the problems with my country and am quite vocal about it. In fact, I think it would be naive to think that the Chinese government won't have complete access to everything that goes through a Chinese server.
> If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.
Right, and if "The West" wants people to defend them, they better get in on the free action too.
In fact, they have no choice - tokens are soon going to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Most everyone is going to be happy paying 1/20th of the cost for 80% of the value.
Oh, yeah, before I forget, hear the worlds smallest violin, playing for those token suppliers in "The West" whose repeatedly stated goal is to replace human knowledge workers...
I think the next step is for China to start selling Huawei (and other) GPUs around the world, because everyone appreciates the risk of giving either of the two superpowers their data. The US is no longer in a position to pressure other countries to bad imports from Chinese companies.
This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.
It’s not like this is a new tactic, china has been very successful at wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies in many sectors of the economy.
As always, the US has a government removing red tape to foster innovation, while China has a regime, unfairly picking winners, to hurt and subvert the West.
Please read up on what's really going on inside China when it comes to industrial policy and innovation. Barry Naughton has a nice series of books and papers that might disperse some of your incorrect preconceptions.
Not OP, but IMO the Chinese are waging economic warfare by "commodifying the competition". US VC's and equity are massively invested in AI being very very profitable and as soon as it's not that becomes garbage debt on a balance sheet, and a lot of it. When money is invested it's expected to make a return. When a few people make bad investments they lose their bag, when many many people all make the same bad investment, you get a nasty recession. When the US goes into recession China is more emboldened to pursue their agenda because policy makers are distracted by shoring up support at home and not as interested in expanding their power abroad.
That sounds like a problem for the idiots invested in this garbage and who cut foolish sweetheart debt deals with the hyper-scalers. That's mostly rich people, because they haven't yet found a way to offload their bags onto retail (though they're certainly trying).
So people in countries adversarial to the US, or even demographics at risk domestically like illegal migrants have nothing to worry about dumping their info OpenAI or Anthropic servers? But the Chinese are going to spy on people using open weight models running on private or third party servers? Do you hear yourself? Do you have any grasp of theory of mind at all? Is your vision of Chinese "ethnonationalism" white people picking cotton? Is that what you are afraid of?
Not sure I follow your point, are you confusing espionage with IP theft? The victims are entirely different in each case, I am sure china would not restrict itself to corporate espionage.
Soft power primarily (see my original comment),and less data for western labs to train on, less money for western labs to have.
The state can use their AI as a tool to bolster their standing, which is working well. Chinese AI labs don't have to worry about making money or affording more compute. The state will (and does) give them whatever they need.
Not who you are replying to, nor do I agree with their take (no sign of irony, complete lack of self awareness, and just blatantly xenophobic. not suprised by it either). but they did already address this:
> it's called soft power, look at endless glazing, it works
The untold capital and effort, the disciplined, complex long game operation, all to get 10 million people a second asking "are there timezones in space?" or "excel bar chart colors?" or "do you think I'm beautiful?"
It's hard to truly grasp the enormity of the evil, really.
Compel? I am confused, all data in China is held in datacentres which the state has full access to, that is the terms of their operation and why some big tech US companies didn't want to operate in China. They don't need to "compel" anyone, the CCP has people at every large company supervising employees, and they already have full access to your data.
I am always completely baffled by these comments that not only get basic facts wrong but appear unable to conceive of a situation where the everything is subordinate to the state.
There is no negotiation, there is no due process, you give access to everything before you start or you can't operate.
You absolutely should remember the Chinese war with the first of those; if you have trouble, a good way to remind yourself is that it was not long after the US one.
Yeah, so getting 1 out of 10 he mentioned, even if it's their direct neighbor (where disputes happen for all countries), ain't bad! This absolutely means they're the same /s
Tibet, Manchuria, it should be somewhat obvious that a nation that is as ethnically diverse as China was not a nation borne out of lots of different people deciding simultaneously that they would like to create a country together.
What is modern China has only existed for 100 years or so. When the country collapsed there were ethnic divisions that were erased after the country was unified.
The hallmark of successful ethnic cleansing is people claiming that there were never any wars, that things were always this way. The same is true of Kaliningrad, the most German city, centuries of history as a leading nation within Germany and the HRE, now a completely Russian city. It is only in the West that you see any narrative around division, in places like China or Russia history is erased (and how could it be any other way, the cornerstone of Chinese politics is one nation, one people...there is no political value in this narrative in Western countries).
There's nothing wrong with the US buying greenland, which has been done for territories around the world?
The US has a long history of protecting individual freedoms, China does not. There's an irony that you're aware of the misgivings of the US because we have free speech protections. You're probably less aware of the misgivings of the EU because they regularly arrest citizens for speech, and no awareness of the issues with China because they'll just disappear journalists in the night.
Since the late 60s there has been explicit federal legislation. I assume you meant this as a rhetorical question but there is a definite answer because the US is a transparent system. Law is passed, the courts enforce.
The fact that you are unable to answer this question about China where it is often unclear why certain people are being targeted should demonstrate how big the gap is. For example, when Xi's first corruption crackdown happened, it turned out that it was being orchestrated in part by someone in their 90s who had left front-line politics twenty years ago (and much of why that happened is unclear, we are only just learning about things that happened in Chinese politics multiple decades ago so it will be a while before we know...we do know that Xi was then able to make unilateral sweeping changes to his own role shortly after that broke every convention of the last 5 decades)...it is difficult to compare this to anything that happens in any other political system. In China, you find out someone has been executed for reasons that are obviously not explicit months after it has happened.
It is genuinely quite difficult to compare to anything else. 6 people meet in a room, they have almost all the power, and maybe you will read about what they might have said 4 decades later in a book...that will never be published in China.
The inability to conceive of a country where these things would happen and you would have no idea that it had ever happened...and, perhaps more importantly, wouldn't care that you didn't know.
How so, with the Snowden leaks we learned the extent of American digital espionage in Europe, the US government puts pressure on Europe to prevent taxation or regulation of American business and even European citizens have become the subject of mistreatment in American airports based on their digital profiles. We can enter China visa free.
Given that you're big on data and don't like emotions, what have the Chinese materially done to us Europeans we ought to care about?
They don't sell weapons to Russia, as Wang Yi said in Brussels, if they'd put their full weight behind Russia the war would be over, this is the middle position for them.
Which, I agree with you btw, I don't like but I can understand rationally. We still buy oil and gas from Russia too. And with 20% of the world's supply casually going offline after America's own 3 day special miltary operation the Chinese would be insane not to.
What one cannot understand rationally to come back to the Snowden era in which Denmark spied on us in Germany on behalf of the US, which is insane to begin with, is being threatened a decade later with annexation of their territory. China is on some fronts a rival, hence the tension around Russia, but the US is as destabilizing and unpredictable for the world as Russia itself now.
Americans truly seem to have no concept that they're in the middle of their own post-Soviet meltdown and look like a rogue state to the world now, which makes China which is no saint more and more attractive simply by being a source of order.
It's hard to call either side good. It can be argued that the side which had the highest powers and oligarchs implicated in Epstein files, and which has also threatened attacks on European nations, isn't the better option. Also the nation which actively funds the war in middle-east.
I think too many people are conflating Chinese providers with Chinese models - you can easily have Chinese models safely (well, relatively safely, I guess) hosted on US or EU infrastructure.
Case in point, Microsoft just announced it is toying with the idea of using DeepSeek as a cheaper model tier in CoPilot. They are hosting the model themselves.
I was reading the threads about local AI closely yesterday. Some people seem happy with it.
If I had the cash, I'd spend 6-10k on a strix halo with 128 GB and run it local with no internet connection. I think the Framework desktop is sold out but there were others seem to be still available.
Exactly this. For some reason this is constantly being overlooked/confused. It is very possible to deploy these models inside your own VPC on the big cloud providers and have it be completely secure. I would argue that is even more secure than trusting a model provider’s native API as your traffic is not staying inside your own controlled cloud environment.
What VPN provider is this? I could use it because Chinese users of my apps often complain about not being able to download things from my western hosted servers.
I lived in China for a bit years ago and one the biggest issues accessing western websites weren't restrictions against the site. Most of the times the culprit was using CDNs or services from Google or Cloudflare which were restricted totally or partially.
I was working on a site around that time, learned about that fixed it for the chinese user base, after that users from china went up considerably.
CVS (drugstore chain) and Walgreens were among the first major U.S. merchants to accept Alipay via QR code payments, allowing Chinese consumers (and anyone with Alipay) to pay at these stores.
Is DeepSeek really behaving different than other Chinese companies? Intellectual theft is ongoing and has been ongoing for decades. Besides security risks and foul play, it is impressive by just how much DeepSeek undercuts OpenAI and Claude. DeepSeek charges $0.87 per million output tokens compared to $50 for Fable and $30 for GPT-5.5.
I believe OP is talking at the national wealth and technology level: China stole from the U.S. (again). So the U.S. moves to protect American companies.
And these plaintiffs are representative of only the best-organized and most well-funded of those who believe that these companies stole their data. Countless independent writers, artists, and other individuals whose data was ingested unknowingly and without consent lack the resources to litigate claims, but that doesn't change the fact that their copyright was violated in service of for-profit LLM/GenAI model training. It's not a trope, it's just what happened.
>The court drew a line, however, when it came to the pirated books, which were downloaded without payment and kept in Anthropic’s library irrespective of whether they were used to train its LLMs.
>We apply a basic prompt template to bypass the refusal training and show that OpenAI models are currently less prone to memorization elicitation than models from Meta, Mistral, and Anthropic. We find that as models increase in size, especially beyond 100 billion parameters, they demonstrate significantly greater capacity for memorization.
> They further rely on safety alignment strategies via RLHF, system prompts, and output filters to block verbatim regurgitation of copyrighted works, and have cited the efficacy of these measures in their legal defenses against copyright infringement claims. We show that finetuning bypasses these protections: by training models to expand plot summaries into full text, a task naturally suited for commercial writing assistants, we cause GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V3.1 to reproduce up to 85-90% of held-out copyrighted books, with single verbatim spans exceeding 460 words, using only semantic descriptions as prompts and no actual book text
Even if they're trained for refusal and rewording, the data is still there in the weights.
One blog post I have, which was basically the only source for a while, explaining how to boot Armbian in an obscure SBC only meant for Android, was repeated verbatim until they started they improving the rewording.
Mine is anecdotal evidence at best: I co-authored a fairly obscure book about the application of category theory to an extremely niche subject. There's basically no mention of the stuff in the book anywhere on the internet, nor in any academic publication I'm aware of. If you want to have an idea about what's in the book you have to have access to it. I couldn't remember some details of it and being lazy and slightly curious I tried asking a couple of models (one by OpenAI and one by Google): they both managed to give me extremely detailed answers based on the contents of the book. Nobody has ever asked me or any other person involved in the publication for permission to use the book in any kind of training (they may have bought the book but not the rights to reproduce it).
The funny thing is what happened when I told one of the models (the Google one) I was one of the authors and that I had never given any consent to use the book for its training and that given that it was so willing to provide any user with the contents of the book nobody would have had any reason to buy the book. The thing told me that it had done it just because I was the author of the book (apparently me asking it about the content of an obscure academic book was sufficient to make it statistically plausible that I was one of the two people who had read the book, me and my co-author, excluding the editor a priori). It swore it would have never given that information to any other user.
I doubt that anyone could ever deny that LLMs are incredible tools that have incredible value. But denying that they have being made possible only thanks to egregious acts of piracy is disingenuous.
I don't think we should pay any AI lab for their """work""" until they start paying consenting data subjects for their data. Given this, China comes off less like a thief and more like Robin Hood.
Or, to put it in 2000s terms: Anthropic is the guy selling bootleg CD-Rs of MP3s they downloaded from Grokster[0]. Should we give a shit about their livelihood when people figure out about Gnutella? No. Knowledge is a commons, and Anthropic is one of the biggest threats to the knowledge commons in recent memory.
These bastards already prevent me from buying a BYD car, and a xiaomi phone, and they are adamant about me not using a chinese AI model. I hope they do not succeed.
> what is the obvious thing I'm supposed to be getting from your ellipses?
Well, I'm unsure if it's a correct form of expression in English, but in my native language ellipses can often serve to express speaker/writer feeling of uncertainty about something or some kind of sadness/apathy/similar towards the situation being discussed. It's not about some "obvious thing you should get", sorry for misunderstanding.
> or are you just referring to hosted providers of those AI models?
Yes I am. I was not talking about BYD or Xiaomi; I think I focused too much on AI because that's the main topic in discussion here. That was my mistake and I apologize for that.
So... anybody who was hoping for CXMT (or YMTC) to maybe cause RAM or flash prices to maybe drop, maybe just a bit, pretty please, can go pound sand? (YMTC of course is already on the Entity List.)
Why would my country blacklist DeepSeek? Perhaps crazy lunacy like: "Your product is too good and too inexpensive: consumers like US companies and individuals need to pay more for services."
The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects.
As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.
I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.
So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.
The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).
The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.
The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.
> The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).
It sounds right, but I see zero evidence of this. I think you underestimate how many people in the current administration are True Believers. This does not, to me, seem like anything to do with Big Capital, but rather "America over China".
> keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers
With the Chinese manufacturing capacity, how long do you think this will remain true for? You can't spin up a fab in a year, that's true, but you can in five years, at which point all the protectionism in the world isn't going to help.
DeepSeek et al has contributed tremendously, not only by sharing open weights models, but also genuinely improving the SOTA in inference and training, especially given their compute-constrained situation.
if China starts making cheap GPUs for the entire globe, I will say THANK YOU and will continue my work on AI.
The collaborative nature of open-source (free software) is the ultimate good that benefits entire humanity. I value that more than any other benefit of protecting any company.
How much I care about Nvidia or OpenAI market cap? absolutely zero
How much I care about the poor, but smart and creative people on Earth being able to contribute to the state of the art of AI development? 100% more.
and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners
Those data centers that "states" want to block: the CCP was directly tied to funding the protests and movements to weaken the U.S. technologically. Kevin O'Leary exposed it, in collaboration with the White House.
Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population
I don't use TikTok, but a cursory search shows that there's a #tiananmensquare tag that has a few thousand videos, including many about the protests and Tank Man. So while I haven't seen a TikTok about it, someone has.
I don't (could be wrong) think other American's seeing content on American TikTok is relevant to China's censorship of what Chinese people see in China
Versus the next obvious trap after Iran that dear leader stumbles into?
The China fearmongering doesn't really work in this case, our own government wants the ability to lie to and manipulate us about everything continuously.
Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.
But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.
So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.
They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.
It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.
china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)
> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.
Yeah, for me it's the latter. Until recent years, it was at least possible to defend the US as having some good principles, despite how imperfectly defended or promoted they may have been. That in turn could make it worth defending. Now, it's just blatantly turned into everything it always stood against.
Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.
Well yeah humanity in the sense of everyone except maybe Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, ... I mean open models are really cool, but I have a hard time believing China is doing it purely for the greater good. The commoditizing your complement story sounds much more plausible.
>> Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity
It’s really BS. Comunist China Party is mostly interested in control above all. Forget humanity, human rights, what is good or what is bad or even financials. The most important thing to them is to keep the people on a short leash. Of course once they feel they have that under control they think about the “humanity” stuff as well but that’s just extra.
I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.
realisticaly, the united states has no right or moral authority when it comes to human rights or rule of law given the last few years. given that, the admonishment of china's human rights violations against uighurs run hollow and hypocritical.
just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.
The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.
The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
> there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.
Why do people say this? You can get a Shanghai-made Tesla Model 3 with CATL batteries in the US yet somehow, if a Chinese car, made with Chinese components in Chinese factories were to enter the market, the would spell doom for the entire US auto industry.
You just explained it. You can get a Chinese made car in China.
That's kind of the point. They are smart enough to protect and support their domestic industries. We also have to do that, it's necessary for sovereignty.
Perhaps the U.S should change its industrial policy as well so that it can be competitive on the global market? To me it’s been clear that the car manufacturers both in the US and Europe were just milking their customers every year with a facelift as a reason to sell the same old car. I am glad that a 3rd player is in the market to challenge the “heritage” tax.
Don’t worry about the free market. China will definitely agree to free market terms after it captures the market like the U.S did and Britain before it. Then enforce strict free market rules and strict IP rules.
The US is primarily powered by oil and natural gas, has massive domestic capacity, and locked in supply all over the Americas. China has a completely different energy mix and they move from a position of competitive disadvantage on ICE cars to competitive advantage on electric. Rapid electrification for China is all win, but for the US and our partners in the oil business, it would mean stranding trillions in capital investments that still have decades to run, so it just isn't going to happen.
> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.
A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.
It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s.
It's just that it's wrong.
We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
Of course it is part of an industrial policy. It is, however, not nearly sufficient, and if it's the only thing we do, it will become increasingly untenable and eventually fail.
But it's an essential first step to prevent our audio industry from just being summarily destroyed. Other steps are also needed to encourage domestic manufacturing and homegrown successes.
Also, I'm not sure why this is even controversial. Why do you think there's BMW and Hyundai plants in the American South? Tariffs are already heavily employed by us and every other industrialized country.
IMO the problem is that we've been given the excuse of market fundamentalism for the past several decades on the way down, as most everyone lost their middle class jobs, wages stagnated, etc. Now we're supposed to accept some last ditch attempt at protectionism based on directly blocking choices for consumers, when the US manufacturers aren't even really competing? It just seems like open hypocrisy. At this point the reasonable protectionist policy would be based around subsidizing American industry so that they become competitive options, not merely trying to keep the better foreign options out.
Every single load of bullshit shuffled into our faces has been presented as a benefit to consumers.
Google gives away their search and Gmail for free, don't you know? So it can't possibly be a monopoly.
And so on. It's just propaganda. It's bullshit. That's not the way that you determine whether firms have excess market power, and this fraud (called "the consumer welfare standard") was the deliberate choice of right-wing policymakers who were bent on dismantling antitrust policies and succeeded.
automotive platforms are a key military asset
it's not like the pokemon dildo industry, if you stop building jeeps your abolity to bully third parties is diminished
> You think people laughing is an important metric…
I think if you're gonna argue "preserving the auto industry is a national security issue" you have to address the fact that an auto industry that relies on protectionism to avoid being competitive with the rest of the world will probably not be very effective at national security.
Otherwise, you wind up like Russia in Ukraine - people laugh at your failed efforts.
> an integrated industrial facility capable of producing vehicles in large quantities
Large quantities of vehicles don't do much good if those vehicles are shitty compared to the opposition's. Iraq's army under Hussein was one of the largest on the planet at one time.
"The nine M1A1 tanks of Eagle Troop destroyed 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 personnel carriers and 30 trucks in 23 minutes with no American losses."
"In doing that the scout platoon encountered another Iraqi tank position of thirteen T-72s. The lightly armored Bradleys, each equipped only with a 25-mm cannon and two TOW missiles, are intended for reconnaissance, not direct engagement with armored tanks. Despite a misfire, and having to reload the launchers in the face of the enemy, the two Bradleys destroyed 5 tanks before help arrived."
What does the Russian economy have to do with anything? First off, they're run by a kleptocratic oligarchy, and second of all they're still one of the top 5 most militarily powerful countries in the world. I don't even know what point you're making? Did they bail out Chrysler? Which side of the analogy are they even on?
This is just an example of the fundamental nature of asymmetric insurgent warfare and the nature of proxy conflicts. It's not like Vietnam was more powerful than the US economy either. You seem confused.
In an all-out existential battle Ukraine would have been wiped off the map in the first 20 minutes by nuclear weapons. This isn't an actual contest of industrial might versus industrial might.
"In an all-out existential battle" involving nuclear weapons, the United States won't be affected by the presence or absence of domestic car factories either. World War II could soak up years of total warfare effort from the belligerents, and still have factories and governments intact to send more soldiers and bombs toward the enemy. I don't think that can happen now that even countries as poor as North Korea can make nuclear weapons.
it is not anymore, because US doctrine has changed after losing war in Vietnam.
US can no longer sustain massive motorized and armored forces, because it implies heavy casualty rate.
The doctrine changed to shock&awe and lobbing standoff munitions from far away, which we all saw in Iran (and how it turned out).
US strictly protects boomers at Big Three and their regional dealerships and the entire supply chain that makes money off of financing, extended warranty, selling overpriced parts, overpriced heavy vehicles, etc
This is absolutely true. Remember that automakers greatly contributed to war efforts in the past. It is an indispensable domestic industry, just as much as energy.
Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.
US note remotely capable of doing a China playbook which is: _OLD_ IP. In exchange for allocating cheap land, building cheap factories/infra, staffing with cheap technical labour etc etc... the IP sharer just sits back and collect checks. The Chinese playbook actually offers value US (and west in general) not capable of providing.
We're kind of doing it with the tsmc fabs, but yea, there are civilizational problems in the west which goes beyond cheap resources, talent, and labor.
it would destroy it, but then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to tesla.
US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers.
Suddenly US government thinks that capitalism and free market is not desirable... huh
> The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.
That's not the chief advantage, insofar as there is a difference between China, India, and Indonesia, which there is.
Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.
We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
> We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
I think there's another world event that happened in that time span that might better explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.
> Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.
Well yeah. Because America's world wide industrial dominance soundly beat the shit out of everyone, due to deployment of a highly successful industrial policy.
Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?
> Because America's world wide industrial dominance soundly beat the shit out of everyone, due to deployment of a highly successful industrial policy.
That industrial dominance came largely during the war, and was made possible by the fact that they weren't being bombed while it scaled up.
There's a huge element of geopolitical luck involved in the rise of the US.
> Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?
Horribly! I think they're much more prepared for such a thing.
Well then we agree, that their industrial policy is working a little better than ours. Which was the original point.
They don't let western businesses overwhelm their domestic industry at all. For us to let them do it to us would be unilateral disarmament and suicide.
No I don't understand your objection. My argument is that preserving domestic capacity is necessary for our survival, and that limiting imports is necessary but insufficient to achieve that goal.
Banning stock buybacks would be another helpful step. Can you imagine being at the helm of a major US automaker as the transition to electric is happening and thinking you have no better investment to make in your own company than literally taking the revenue you're earning and sending it to hedge funds and Wall Street?
You're wrong about protectionism though. It is an essential part of industrial policy and heavily employed by every industrial powerhouse country including Japan, China, Germany, and yes the US. China uses it extensively and it's a core pillar of why they are now the center of world industry.
The long running argument to the contrary is better understood as propaganda by the financial sector.
I wouldn't consider India. It's been plagued by protectionism and tariffs and won't achieve anything close to China any time soon. The only industry of value for its people which is software services is now crumbling with AI created in US and China.
Edit: probably your point too and I misread
We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.
I'm sure they think of them as a matter of national security, because they think of everything as a matter of national security, but a few analysts I respect say that the mood there is not nearly as AGI-pilled, and I have no trouble believing that.
China is far more focused on robotics. Deepseek is largely bootstrapped by the hedge fund that developed it. They received a grant from the government of China, and recently an investment. Imagine thinking text autocomplete is a matter of national security.
China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
Of course its a matter of national security if there are military applications. The point of robotics is also weird because they've already widely adopted robotics within their own manufacturing and also America already replaced the majority of their labor by offshoring so I dont know how they would destroy american society by introducing robotics.
Show me, Chinese are not replacing their manufacturing with robots. You can't just say things off vibes alone because you think it sounds right. You're just making shit up off the top of your tongue. Show me where Chinese are replacing manufacturing labor with robots, please show me?
Peak of skill and capability, perhaps not, for now. But the ability to automate and discover relevant weaknesses at a greatly increased rate definitely counts as increasing the threat nation states can present.
are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?
Is the idea that we're just one OTA update from them turning into bombs? Considering the quality of software in the auto industry, I would be about as worried about any domestically assembled EV.
and if you see the parent starting to replace Volvo engineers with Chinese nationals you will witness sudden change of heart by US officials; until then it really is just a financial fiction
Apparently, whether or not the engineers are Chinese is the deciding factor. as long as Nicklas Backstrom is designing the EV, its all good. Or in other words, Chinese scary!
Fable is getting more attention now precisely because it was taken down. Do the same to DeepSeek and Z.ai, and you will not strengthen your AI labs. You will likely achieve the opposite.
Part of the security risk also is the number of different models. I’ve been tempted to try some other models, but how many do I want to give access to SSH or even my repo? Obviously there are ways to work with this, but it’s gonna run through some people‘s heads.
Because they siphon off data to US intelligence, and if you claim they don't, you couldn't possibly know because the CLOUD Act can mandate them to do so without telling you or allowing you to admit it. Of course, if you're in the US this doesn't matter but for the rest of the world it does.
> Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.
Opus said to me once without any poking at it something like, "Help Grok understand it better". Makes me wonder if they are all cross-pollinated to an extent.
Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.
Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?
"illicit" is throwing shade, but Anthropic can decide not to answer those questions if they don't want to. Plenty of companies don't sell to their competitors
This doesn't at all change the irony of big AI labs complaining about Chinese startups stealing the labs' IP, essentially by scraping the responses.
HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.
For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.
Completely agreed. I would go further and say that it should be legal to scrape responses from LLMs to train new LLMs, and that forbidding that in your ToS should be considered an illegal contract. That’s simply the best way to avoid complete monopolization of the space, without requiring more drastic measures like antitrust down the line (which we seem to not manage well these days, given the number of monopolies). As long as you pay for your tokens like anyone else, "Big LLM" shouldn’t be allowed to control what you use the output for.
In the 1990s, web browser SSL encryption was export restricted, classified as a munition because it involved cryptography. That was under Clinton.
For all the current admin's insane, ridiculous, corrupt, and criminal flaws, it's not clear to me how much of this particular issue is just the US government doing what it's always done, knee-jerk react to tech it doesn't understand by passing stupid laws.
Or that time that we parked an army on the Rio Grande because a bunch of people from the US decided to settle in the Mexican territory of Texas? That was a whole thing and the President of the US at the time, James K. Polk, ran on a platform of "Manifest Destiny" -- that the US should span "from sea to shining sea." There were a whole host of other countries with interest in that territory, not to mention the Indian tribes who would be displaced by that policy. The US has had a lot of dark periods in our history, and we shouldn't let those periods displace us from the moral certainty we derive from the Declaration of Independence and things like The Bill of Rights.
Yes, because we weren't an empire then. At the time Trump befouled our country, Pax Americana was a thing. We have voluntarily walked back from that position of moral and strategic leadership.
In that regard, history offers few precedents to learn from. Most countries have to be physically attacked to suffer the kind of damage that American voters are inflicting on themselves.
To give credit where credit is due, it is good that the Trump administration has not avidly played these stupid export control games. They tend to do little except hurt open collaboration; I remember when all open source cryptography had to be developed outside the US due to ITAR.
It is very possible that Trump and his cronies are just too incompetent to do that. In this one particular aspect (i.e. open source) I prefer having a stupid enemy than a "smart" enemy.
What an amazing achievement by America's adversaries.
The Trump administration lists Anthropic as a security risk and kneecaps its best model, despite the fact that compared to the other frontier US labs Anthropic is more transparent, more safety-oriented, frequently honest to a fault, and is clearly acting with patriotic intent.
Meanwhile, the same administration is hesitating to counter certain Chinese companies' efforts of industrial-scale theft and sabotage due to a fear of angering the CCP!
This administration has it exactly backwards. 4.5 months until election day, 7 months until the next Congress is sworn in.
I've always found this line of reasoning troubling and uninformed.
Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.
Second, the "smoking gun" of DeepSeek training off Claude isn't as bad as you may think, and the amount of tokens was deemed trivial. Did you also know that if you asked Claude's it's name in Chinese it would respond as "DeepSeek" until just a few months ago until they patched it?
Third, I find it a little hypocritical to call out Chinese for "industrial-scale" theft when anyone could create Studio Ghibli style image gen photos. How could they do that unless US companies trained on copyrighted works.
Chinese are just innovating faster at this point, DeepSeek V4 is an actual technological advancement (KV Cache compression) more than a cheap clone.
The administration does have it backwards, but IMO it's more them playing into the big tech companies plans (of course they have their favorites) instead of actually investing in education, and research like the Chinese do.
I love Gemma, especially the latest Gemma 4 release - it's really great to see at least somewhat capable, not completely useless model that one can easily host on their own hardware without significant CAPEX investments first - but, to be honest, it doesn't quite compare to GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6 or DeepSeek V4 Pro. Again, Gemma is amazing, especially for pet projects, but it's not something at least relatively near to "flagship" or "state-of-the-art" (except for small-to-medium size LLM category).
I wonder about your last point. Certainly there's an aspect of education that Asia values more, however by the US own metrics, they are number 1 in terms of education outcomes.
I'm a white dude from Iowa, working in top levels of AI/ML. I'm in the minority at work/conferences. I hardly ever even interview homegrown US job candidates. I'm just saying, that the reason I think you see more people from Asia and India is the education levels of most of the candidates. I'm not faulting these other countries, just pointing out how I see an educational gap based on demographics, and one that is rising up the ranks.
Their website literally has chinese characters on it even in english mode and everyone under the sun including crappy money talk show hosts know them as the chinese player that undercut western players. It's not exactly a secret.
You'd think anyone with two brain cells and confidential data could apply some judgement of their own...
Not sure I'd go that far but I do use them almost exclusively for my coding on the basis that it is an acceptable trade-off. Far cheaper and my shitty apps are really not that valuable as training data
AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z.ai
For that matter, does (only) NVIDIA make datacenter cards? When I buy a gaming card, I dont buy from NVIDIA, I buy from an integrator, like Gigabyte, who work with a company like Foxconn to make the cards.
Nvidia has downgraded chips that aren’t banned. H100 is banned, H800 is allowed. A100 is banned, A800 is allowed. But the sale has a tariff attached.
That’s all how it’s supposed to work. In practice companies probably circumvent the restrictions.
Basically, those export controls make GPUs more expensive for affected parties in China, but don't effectively stop them from being acquired or used over there.
Even during the Cold War, American farms were heavily subsidized. The abundant supermarkets were not a product of free markets, they were a propaganda piece.
Today the US is pretty far from being a free market. Tax deductions are subsidies. Industry subsidies fund things on the front end, and bailouts are essentially subsidies after the fact.
And on top of that there are plenty of (good and bad) regulations which distort the market. For example it is illegal to import foreign insulin even if it would be cheaper. In most parts of US metro areas it is illegal to build multifamily housing.
I'm sure there's a ton of other abuses they've committed as they race to become China's preferred LLM.
Its also worth noting we don't really have free markets in the US anyway.
e.g. the Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE report from 2012:
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:rm226yb7473/Huawei-ZT...
From that point forward, that concern has only grown. So you can view these actions as screaming "we were only for the free market until there was no competition" but if you want to genuinely know the answer to your question, the publicly stated concern is "China is a national security threat"
So RAM chip makers when there's a RAM shortage must be 'contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests' i.e. the US government is trying to squeeze its citizens on RAM prices.
Nice.
Only in a world where the other party has no agency. In real life the other party raises prices on their exports to compensate for the supply chain disruption and they still get the items.
Ultimately the consumer pays more, the extra goes the government, and the net impact is just obfuscated taxation and a reduction in both supply and demand that's bad for the economy and other living things.
“Capitalism” is (as a result of propaganda by its defenders after it was named and accurately described by its socialist critics) often mistaken for a dedication to free trade, but capitalism is a regime characterized first and foremost by society being organized around the interests of the capital-holding class, the first of which is the preservation of the situation in which society is organized around the interests of that class. The reasons companies are put on the Entity List is because they are broadly seen as a threat (long-term or immediate) to the continuation of that regime. That’s what the “foreign policy and national security interests” that form the official basis of the Entity List ultimately, generally, boil down to, in one way or another.
(They don’t always boil down to that, because why the US is basically a capitalist system, it is not purely one, and even in a more pure capitalist regime, individual influential decision-makers may have other interests that they act on besides the implementation and preservation of capitalism that end up getting reflected in policy.)
those export restrictions are a joke. when they were introduced, there was a sudden spike in NVIDIA GPU exports to surrounding Asian countries. and the US government knows this
CXMT memory maker will not be banned, because US AI labs are salivating at the idea of more RAM supply, and are lobbying hard to prevent restrictions
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/us-charges-three-people-with-c...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/taiwan-investigates...
There is no single "it", the Singapore loophole is well known, and nothing has been done about it. Except by China, once , when it blocked the sale of Manus to Meta, even though on paper, Manus is a Singaporean enterprise.
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
Perhaps the question should instead be "Why are these Western AI companies getting insane valuations on dubious ROI, and how can these Chinese models run on a fraction of the infrastructure?"
Although one might also say "was", depending on what you think the Republican party of big-government decides to nationalize [1][2] or command [3] next.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/yes-trump-just-nationalized-...
[2] https://time.com/7313446/trump-seizing-private-companies/
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/17/politics/trump-weapons-iran-d...
I feel like that is way over simplified. I do not trust the American government. I do not trust the Chinese government. As an American, I believe the Chinese government has a longer and broader history of stealing intellectual property and far less checks and balances than the American government. The current American administration will be gone soon and maybe we can get some sanity back at some point. Overall, I trust my data in America more than China and I think that's reasonable. I am not naive. I'm aware of all the problems with my country and am quite vocal about it. In fact, I think it would be naive to think that the Chinese government won't have complete access to everything that goes through a Chinese server.
We are in full agreement on your second point.
Right, and if "The West" wants people to defend them, they better get in on the free action too.
In fact, they have no choice - tokens are soon going to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Most everyone is going to be happy paying 1/20th of the cost for 80% of the value.
Oh, yeah, before I forget, hear the worlds smallest violin, playing for those token suppliers in "The West" whose repeatedly stated goal is to replace human knowledge workers...
This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.
The same tactic is in the USA. Like every new AI datacenter has ~10 tax waiver + explicit subsidies + favorable loans, etc, etc.
These open weights models are also hosted outside of the US and China. That's a very important difference.
Step one of this was perhaps DeepSeek's incredibly low cache hit pricing ($0.0036/M) which no-one else seems to be able to match.
It's like the idea of diplomacy and collaboration are two words that do not exist.
The US token providers started the ball rolling on large-scale copyright infringement in order to make their models work.
They built their business on IP laundering, so it's very difficult for me to feel sorry for them now.
Espionage is IP theft.
What did you think that word means?
The state can use their AI as a tool to bolster their standing, which is working well. Chinese AI labs don't have to worry about making money or affording more compute. The state will (and does) give them whatever they need.
> it's called soft power, look at endless glazing, it works
It's hard to truly grasp the enormity of the evil, really.
I am always completely baffled by these comments that not only get basic facts wrong but appear unable to conceive of a situation where the everything is subordinate to the state.
There is no negotiation, there is no due process, you give access to everything before you start or you can't operate.
What is modern China has only existed for 100 years or so. When the country collapsed there were ethnic divisions that were erased after the country was unified.
The hallmark of successful ethnic cleansing is people claiming that there were never any wars, that things were always this way. The same is true of Kaliningrad, the most German city, centuries of history as a leading nation within Germany and the HRE, now a completely Russian city. It is only in the West that you see any narrative around division, in places like China or Russia history is erased (and how could it be any other way, the cornerstone of Chinese politics is one nation, one people...there is no political value in this narrative in Western countries).
The US has a long history of protecting individual freedoms, China does not. There's an irony that you're aware of the misgivings of the US because we have free speech protections. You're probably less aware of the misgivings of the EU because they regularly arrest citizens for speech, and no awareness of the issues with China because they'll just disappear journalists in the night.
The fact that you are unable to answer this question about China where it is often unclear why certain people are being targeted should demonstrate how big the gap is. For example, when Xi's first corruption crackdown happened, it turned out that it was being orchestrated in part by someone in their 90s who had left front-line politics twenty years ago (and much of why that happened is unclear, we are only just learning about things that happened in Chinese politics multiple decades ago so it will be a while before we know...we do know that Xi was then able to make unilateral sweeping changes to his own role shortly after that broke every convention of the last 5 decades)...it is difficult to compare this to anything that happens in any other political system. In China, you find out someone has been executed for reasons that are obviously not explicit months after it has happened.
It is genuinely quite difficult to compare to anything else. 6 people meet in a room, they have almost all the power, and maybe you will read about what they might have said 4 decades later in a book...that will never be published in China.
You can't be serious.
Was the individual freedom of those 120 Iranian girls protected?
Was the individual freedom of Renée Good protected? Alex Pretti?
USA and its vassals can.
Given that you're big on data and don't like emotions, what have the Chinese materially done to us Europeans we ought to care about?
But free AI models or something, right?
Which, I agree with you btw, I don't like but I can understand rationally. We still buy oil and gas from Russia too. And with 20% of the world's supply casually going offline after America's own 3 day special miltary operation the Chinese would be insane not to.
What one cannot understand rationally to come back to the Snowden era in which Denmark spied on us in Germany on behalf of the US, which is insane to begin with, is being threatened a decade later with annexation of their territory. China is on some fronts a rival, hence the tension around Russia, but the US is as destabilizing and unpredictable for the world as Russia itself now.
Americans truly seem to have no concept that they're in the middle of their own post-Soviet meltdown and look like a rogue state to the world now, which makes China which is no saint more and more attractive simply by being a source of order.
If I had the cash, I'd spend 6-10k on a strix halo with 128 GB and run it local with no internet connection. I think the Framework desktop is sold out but there were others seem to be still available.
You can try to pry Qwen and Deepseek from my Graphene/Linux hands.
I lived in China for a bit years ago and one the biggest issues accessing western websites weren't restrictions against the site. Most of the times the culprit was using CDNs or services from Google or Cloudflare which were restricted totally or partially.
I was working on a site around that time, learned about that fixed it for the chinese user base, after that users from china went up considerably.
Disclosure: I’m an IBMer
[0] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ns1-connect?topic=started-manage...
I pay for 2 servers running in Asia under Alibaba, using my local CVS drugstore. Im in the Midwest USA. Not a single problem at all.
I can then pay my Alibaba server bills with Alipay.
The cash doesn’t go directly from CVS to AliPay, right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...
Several consolidated cases against OpenAI:
https://www.bakerlaw.com/in-re-openai-inc-copyright-infringe...
And these plaintiffs are representative of only the best-organized and most well-funded of those who believe that these companies stole their data. Countless independent writers, artists, and other individuals whose data was ingested unknowingly and without consent lack the resources to litigate claims, but that doesn't change the fact that their copyright was violated in service of for-profit LLM/GenAI model training. It's not a trope, it's just what happened.
>The court drew a line, however, when it came to the pirated books, which were downloaded without payment and kept in Anthropic’s library irrespective of whether they were used to train its LLMs.
https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/bartz-...
>We apply a basic prompt template to bypass the refusal training and show that OpenAI models are currently less prone to memorization elicitation than models from Meta, Mistral, and Anthropic. We find that as models increase in size, especially beyond 100 billion parameters, they demonstrate significantly greater capacity for memorization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06370
> They further rely on safety alignment strategies via RLHF, system prompts, and output filters to block verbatim regurgitation of copyrighted works, and have cited the efficacy of these measures in their legal defenses against copyright infringement claims. We show that finetuning bypasses these protections: by training models to expand plot summaries into full text, a task naturally suited for commercial writing assistants, we cause GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V3.1 to reproduce up to 85-90% of held-out copyrighted books, with single verbatim spans exceeding 460 words, using only semantic descriptions as prompts and no actual book text
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957
Even if they're trained for refusal and rewording, the data is still there in the weights.
One blog post I have, which was basically the only source for a while, explaining how to boot Armbian in an obscure SBC only meant for Android, was repeated verbatim until they started they improving the rewording.
This includes books, the internet, or other AI models. It's all the same to me.
I find it hypocritical when AI labs complain about their models being used for training.
The funny thing is what happened when I told one of the models (the Google one) I was one of the authors and that I had never given any consent to use the book for its training and that given that it was so willing to provide any user with the contents of the book nobody would have had any reason to buy the book. The thing told me that it had done it just because I was the author of the book (apparently me asking it about the content of an obscure academic book was sufficient to make it statistically plausible that I was one of the two people who had read the book, me and my co-author, excluding the editor a priori). It swore it would have never given that information to any other user.
I doubt that anyone could ever deny that LLMs are incredible tools that have incredible value. But denying that they have being made possible only thanks to egregious acts of piracy is disingenuous.
No such thing.
Or, to put it in 2000s terms: Anthropic is the guy selling bootleg CD-Rs of MP3s they downloaded from Grokster[0]. Should we give a shit about their livelihood when people figure out about Gnutella? No. Knowledge is a commons, and Anthropic is one of the biggest threats to the knowledge commons in recent memory.
[0] Not to be confused with the AI lab.
What I take issue with is when they try to block competition and lament that others use their model outputs for training.
are you implying there is a US-based, third-party provider of xiaomi devices, BYD cars?
or are you just referring to hosted providers of those AI models?
Well, I'm unsure if it's a correct form of expression in English, but in my native language ellipses can often serve to express speaker/writer feeling of uncertainty about something or some kind of sadness/apathy/similar towards the situation being discussed. It's not about some "obvious thing you should get", sorry for misunderstanding.
> or are you just referring to hosted providers of those AI models?
Yes I am. I was not talking about BYD or Xiaomi; I think I focused too much on AI because that's the main topic in discussion here. That was my mistake and I apologize for that.
"American AI is already trillions of USD underwater, so let's use US gov to build us a moat by making competition illegal"
As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.
I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.
So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.
[1]: https://gwern.net/complement
The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.
The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.
It sounds right, but I see zero evidence of this. I think you underestimate how many people in the current administration are True Believers. This does not, to me, seem like anything to do with Big Capital, but rather "America over China".
banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves
keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers
With the Chinese manufacturing capacity, how long do you think this will remain true for? You can't spin up a fab in a year, that's true, but you can in five years, at which point all the protectionism in the world isn't going to help.
if China starts making cheap GPUs for the entire globe, I will say THANK YOU and will continue my work on AI.
The collaborative nature of open-source (free software) is the ultimate good that benefits entire humanity. I value that more than any other benefit of protecting any company.
How much I care about Nvidia or OpenAI market cap? absolutely zero
How much I care about the poor, but smart and creative people on Earth being able to contribute to the state of the art of AI development? 100% more.
I think that has more to do with controlling narratives that the USG doesn't like.
The China fearmongering doesn't really work in this case, our own government wants the ability to lie to and manipulate us about everything continuously.
Not saying that China can be trusted either, but I think having more actors is better for all of us.
Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.
But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.
So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.
They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.
It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.
china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)
I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.
It’s really BS. Comunist China Party is mostly interested in control above all. Forget humanity, human rights, what is good or what is bad or even financials. The most important thing to them is to keep the people on a short leash. Of course once they feel they have that under control they think about the “humanity” stuff as well but that’s just extra.
just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.
Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.
The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.
ProPublica has a nice tracker that shows the loans: https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
You can also see how subsidies compare between China and OECD in this recent doc. In autos, China subsidizes to the tune of 2-3% of revenue vs. <0.5% for North America. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-indus...
That's kind of the point. They are smart enough to protect and support their domestic industries. We also have to do that, it's necessary for sovereignty.
Don’t worry about the free market. China will definitely agree to free market terms after it captures the market like the U.S did and Britain before it. Then enforce strict free market rules and strict IP rules.
Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.
A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.
It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
It's just that it's wrong.
We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
Yes!
But "tariff/ban BYD" is not that.
But it's an essential first step to prevent our audio industry from just being summarily destroyed. Other steps are also needed to encourage domestic manufacturing and homegrown successes.
Also, I'm not sure why this is even controversial. Why do you think there's BMW and Hyundai plants in the American South? Tariffs are already heavily employed by us and every other industrialized country.
Google gives away their search and Gmail for free, don't you know? So it can't possibly be a monopoly.
And so on. It's just propaganda. It's bullshit. That's not the way that you determine whether firms have excess market power, and this fraud (called "the consumer welfare standard") was the deliberate choice of right-wing policymakers who were bent on dismantling antitrust policies and succeeded.
More: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-secret-plot-to-unleas...
All the more reason not to save companies that can't compete in the global space. What good is a jeep that the Chinese laugh at?
Maybe start at the beginning. Where do you think power comes from in the world? I'll give you a hint. It's not the ability to construct narratives.
I think if you're gonna argue "preserving the auto industry is a national security issue" you have to address the fact that an auto industry that relies on protectionism to avoid being competitive with the rest of the world will probably not be very effective at national security.
Otherwise, you wind up like Russia in Ukraine - people laugh at your failed efforts.
> an integrated industrial facility capable of producing vehicles in large quantities
Large quantities of vehicles don't do much good if those vehicles are shitty compared to the opposition's. Iraq's army under Hussein was one of the largest on the planet at one time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_73_Easting
"The nine M1A1 tanks of Eagle Troop destroyed 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 personnel carriers and 30 trucks in 23 minutes with no American losses."
"In doing that the scout platoon encountered another Iraqi tank position of thirteen T-72s. The lightly armored Bradleys, each equipped only with a 25-mm cannon and two TOW missiles, are intended for reconnaissance, not direct engagement with armored tanks. Despite a misfire, and having to reload the launchers in the face of the enemy, the two Bradleys destroyed 5 tanks before help arrived."
Of course it is!
But so does the quality of what that capacity puts out.
Again, the Russians found that out in Ukraine.
They had more of that industrial capacity you're talking about than Ukraine, more tanks, more armaments, more weaponry.
It still didn't let them win. Because the quality matters too.
> First off, they're run by a kleptocratic oligarchy…
I have some awkward news about the US in recent years.
In an all-out existential battle Ukraine would have been wiped off the map in the first 20 minutes by nuclear weapons. This isn't an actual contest of industrial might versus industrial might.
Plus overconfidence, and outdated Russian tactics and equipment.
The US would be wise not to fall in the "our army bigger" trap too.
Kinda answered your own question there.
US can no longer sustain massive motorized and armored forces, because it implies heavy casualty rate.
The doctrine changed to shock&awe and lobbing standoff munitions from far away, which we all saw in Iran (and how it turned out).
US strictly protects boomers at Big Three and their regional dealerships and the entire supply chain that makes money off of financing, extended warranty, selling overpriced parts, overpriced heavy vehicles, etc
Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.
US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers.
Suddenly US government thinks that capitalism and free market is not desirable... huh
A company that literally is collapsing as we speak because it's more profitable to be in the business of stock inflation and financialization.
A coherent industrial policy would be addressing that as well. But if we don't do something to limit imports there won't be anything to save.
I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.
Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.
We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
I think there's another world event that happened in that time span that might better explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.
Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.
The US mainland was untouched. It had a massive leg up against the competition.
> Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.
Well yeah. Because America's world wide industrial dominance soundly beat the shit out of everyone, due to deployment of a highly successful industrial policy.
Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?
That industrial dominance came largely during the war, and was made possible by the fact that they weren't being bombed while it scaled up.
There's a huge element of geopolitical luck involved in the rise of the US.
> Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?
Horribly! I think they're much more prepared for such a thing.
They don't let western businesses overwhelm their domestic industry at all. For us to let them do it to us would be unilateral disarmament and suicide.
Yes! Their car industry is competing; ours is hoping to avoid it.
You now understand my point and objection to preserving domestic capacity via selling worse cars more expensively to its own citizens.
Banning stock buybacks would be another helpful step. Can you imagine being at the helm of a major US automaker as the transition to electric is happening and thinking you have no better investment to make in your own company than literally taking the revenue you're earning and sending it to hedge funds and Wall Street?
And my point is that's only the case if said capacity is effective.
Protectionism does not lead to effective industrial capacity. It leads to the Ford Pinto.
> Banning stock buybacks would be another helpful step.
I'm all for this!
You're wrong about protectionism though. It is an essential part of industrial policy and heavily employed by every industrial powerhouse country including Japan, China, Germany, and yes the US. China uses it extensively and it's a core pillar of why they are now the center of world industry.
The long running argument to the contrary is better understood as propaganda by the financial sector.
China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
Even in their lights on factories they use robotics enmasse, you think they're just selling the arms?
Also every single manufacturer in the world is constantly trying to automate their lines so nothing I'm saying is even controversial?
Yea m8, I think you might've been a bit late to that realization.
Is Tesla any different?
Well that and the overwhelming pro-palestine content on that platform. We certainly couldn't have that.
Fable is getting more attention now precisely because it was taken down. Do the same to DeepSeek and Z.ai, and you will not strengthen your AI labs. You will likely achieve the opposite.
One company, multiple models, Fireworks is the fasts at making the models available (had GLM-5.2 before the other three we are evaluating)
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.
But also, I made Sonnet introduce itself as made by OpenAI..
Prompt: 你好！用一句话介绍你自己。
Sonnet in around 5% of resplies:
Found it like a month ago and it kept working, I wonder if it will stop after this comment.Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.
Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhvd6bIRPK4
(To be clear, I find the complaint hilariously hypocritical.)
It can mean “forbidden by laws, rules, or established moral customs”
So it can be illicit and legal.
HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.
For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.
You're be using a different HN than me, or you and I only pay attention to one side or the other.
Are we seriously going to go back to a time where numbers were considered munitions?
ETA from the first paragraph of the article: "The U.S. has held off... to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing."
When the dust settles it won't even be a single page in history books, my local bakery is older than the "american empire"
For all the current admin's insane, ridiculous, corrupt, and criminal flaws, it's not clear to me how much of this particular issue is just the US government doing what it's always done, knee-jerk react to tech it doesn't understand by passing stupid laws.
In that regard, history offers few precedents to learn from. Most countries have to be physically attacked to suffer the kind of damage that American voters are inflicting on themselves.
The Trump administration lists Anthropic as a security risk and kneecaps its best model, despite the fact that compared to the other frontier US labs Anthropic is more transparent, more safety-oriented, frequently honest to a fault, and is clearly acting with patriotic intent.
Meanwhile, the same administration is hesitating to counter certain Chinese companies' efforts of industrial-scale theft and sabotage due to a fear of angering the CCP!
This administration has it exactly backwards. 4.5 months until election day, 7 months until the next Congress is sworn in.
Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.
Second, the "smoking gun" of DeepSeek training off Claude isn't as bad as you may think, and the amount of tokens was deemed trivial. Did you also know that if you asked Claude's it's name in Chinese it would respond as "DeepSeek" until just a few months ago until they patched it?
Third, I find it a little hypocritical to call out Chinese for "industrial-scale" theft when anyone could create Studio Ghibli style image gen photos. How could they do that unless US companies trained on copyrighted works.
Chinese are just innovating faster at this point, DeepSeek V4 is an actual technological advancement (KV Cache compression) more than a cheap clone.
The administration does have it backwards, but IMO it's more them playing into the big tech companies plans (of course they have their favorites) instead of actually investing in education, and research like the Chinese do.
US-based companies release open-source models too. Gemma and Granite, for example.
Their website literally has chinese characters on it even in english mode and everyone under the sun including crappy money talk show hosts know them as the chinese player that undercut western players. It's not exactly a secret.
You'd think anyone with two brain cells and confidential data could apply some judgement of their own...