It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin". Is it from a newsletter or something?

Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.

From my perspective curtailing Ant's plans was positive regulatory action.

Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.

The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)

Some of these were very good decisions imho, from someone who spent two months in Chineese rural area around ~2019.

- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).

- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.

- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.

- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.

China tech industry is smoking ruin? On what planet are you living?

Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin

Not really, no. What planet is this on?

> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs

"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"

[https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-f...]

Orange and apples... China has very intentional policy behind those decisions. The US... Not so much. I don't buy that Trump and his whole cabinet are as dumb as they look, but they are only motivated by profit. And ignorance.

Hey some of them take an entire Saturday off to go to a family friendly demonstration holding witty signs in front of their state capitol!

While laughing at the stereotype of French being on the street all the time

The onion finds itself in a peculiar spot today

Usually this format of quip is meant to imply hypocrisy, but that doesn't apply here, so I don't know what you're implying.

It's also more typical of a Reddit or YouTube comment, rather than HN, but that's a separate issue.

Yes, to the surprise of some HNers, regulations can be good or bad. Just because there are people unhappy with current regulation doesn't automatically mean regulation shouldn't exist at all.

BTW this isn't an opinion on the availability of GPT 5.6. I couldn't care less about that.

Anth/OpenAI simply wanted the government to pull the ladder after them and ban models from China.

Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.

Imagine if someone was lobbying for some reasonable regulation (we should regulate drugs, based around clinical trials) and then instead of a transparent system you get purely executive actions with little to no public justification (Trump declares all glp1s illegal no one knows why exactly)

Would you levy the same two quote criticism of the reasonable call for regulation?

>because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.

Just because the many headed dragon is trying to bite your sailors' heads doesn't mean you should pilot your ship into the whirlpool

Expect the US to sanction non-US-controlled models and put sanctions on individuals, companies and countries that use them? They already do this with other things like oil.

It’s looking very fragile from a legal point of view. Ownership of compute and software freedom will be next k the chopping block after control of networks that’s occurring at the moment.

This isn't going to save you unless you're ok being a criminal. There is nothing stopping the government from making open source versions of these models equally controlled.

And given how willy-nilly they are operating I see no reason they won't clamp down on open source. All it takes is someone with connections/political contributions wakes up one day and realizes that open source is a threat to their power or bottom line and it will be declared an imminent threat with no oversight or debate.

It's looking good until you start to see the US gov forcing cloudflare to block hugging face and others.

seriously, ordered more hardware this week, as it gets more dystopian every week

wondering when more people will raise their voice and get engaged

It's the year of the open source AI model is the new 'It's the year of the Linux Desktop'. It's not and never will be for 90% of people

> wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?

They would do what the thousands of other companies do with their tens of thousands of engineers handling ITAR/EAR-regulated software/hardware every day: compartmentalize their workforces, buildings, and access.

because the administration has been repeating the same patterns over pretty much its entire existence.

Dont worry though, the rest of the entire world gets access to better chinese models :-), once they get a taste for those the US has lost their little trade game and the future truly belongs to China.

Its almost like they are serving it up on a silver platter.

ofc they are not, they are just betting all in their models will be better, which is unlikely. (just look at the chinese law and all the names atop of advanced AI papers...)

China already restricts ai models in China. Every model is already submitted to the prc for approval. The us is a follower here

im crying bro snuck in india

Basically the signal is that the total market for any US AI company is capped at however big the US market is. As non-US AI converges to Opus 4.8 level parity, whatever is still non-US consumer base shrinks towards zero.

Worse: we'd be paying US companies to train models we'll never be able to use.

Don't worry, their pals in the government will bail them out.

But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid- to long-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.

> +1 point to China!

Which, like the US, uses export controls when it finds them advantageous: https://nam.org/china-imposes-export-controls-on-u-s-mineral...

> In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over my sovereignty.

So, locate in China, where every company of importance is essentially required in practice to maintain ties to the CCP?

I personally think the US has gone too far with its use of export controls and sanctions as a political tool, but it's foolish to believe that it's different anywhere else on the planet.

In China, it has even been reported that top AI talent is restricted from overseas travel.

https://www.thinkchina.sg/technology/china-tightens-control-...

Bottom line: if you're working on cutting-edge technology that is deemed to be of critical national security importance and has military or dual use implications, you're going to be a hostage no matter where you go.

I think it’s pretty clear why they’re abiding by this:

-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.

-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.

Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.

-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.

It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.

The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.

I think the bigger reckoning will come from a different angle: tokens will eventually need to cover cost.

That will likely mean multiplying prices compared to today. And companies already complain now!

Model orchestration and smaller models that can run locally or cheaply will become more important in my opinion.

Right now, you can still default to GPT/Claude and it’s kind of fine, but that will have to change.

> I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully.

They literally asked for this.

> AI firms are abiding by this peacefully

What are they going to do about it? Might makes right.

They've already done what little they can: pull access to their models wholesale rather than adopt an export compliance regime.

GLM-5.2 is currently the best open-weight model for development. It's not as good as the current American SOTA models, but if you wrote code with US SOTA models four months ago, you can write code with GLM-5.2 today.

DeepSeek 4 is a good model for many tasks, but I think it currently lacks the post-training required to become a genuinely great coding model.

From US companies that is.

If it's the case then software engineers still have the same place as pre-ClaudeCode era, because 4.8 and 5.5 are damn good at algo but notoriously bad at architecture and coordination.

Yes, we will get a crippled version of Mythos, 5.6 and future models, while the chosen few will have unfettered access.

Thousands of American engineers all over the country (most of whom probably aren't on Hacker News) work with ITAR/EAR-regulated software and hardware every single day: these regulations are really not difficult to abide if you're a citizen.

The overwhelming majority of export-controlled items are made by private corporations: the US government itself makes exceedingly little in comparison.

The missiles Raytheon makes are export-controlled too, and they're not somehow "property of the US government" - this isn't China.

Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?

> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?

Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.

That was always the playbook

> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?

I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK

There are some steps in the good direction:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-sel...

A consortium will train a 400B-class model and get 2.5% on time of the EuroHPC infrastructure (~2000 PFLOPS datacenters). So, even if the Chinese take away the open source there will be some models. Probably not Mythos quality yet though.

Europe is in the worst spot right now, because even if open source is the future, there is not enough European-owned datacenters even for inference. Not to mention that China could pull the rug on these models at any moment just like the US did.

> the world really has moved on to open models

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for open models, but I think it will get more and more difficult to distil-train them without (legitimate) access to frontier models.