This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:

- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?

- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time

- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs

- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)

- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience

- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits

So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.

Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.

Yea not sure who would put money into an OpenAI or Anthropic IPO at this point. After this episode I promptly bought the hardware I needed to run local models (~$25k) and am extremely impressed. The price tag alone is worth the peace of mind knowing I will always have a locally running LLM that nobody can take away. I don't need Mythos-level intelligence to do 99% of my day to day work; Opus 4.8 was more than enough and I am pretty close to that with the open source models. So what happens when this hardware inevitably gets cheaper and cheaper and people realize they can run the models they actually need locally and without handing all their data over to these companies?

Only if you're doing cutting edge research or some highly, highly niche project would you need the frontier models.

You have thought about this longer than anyone who made the decision. Stop caring, it only makes your head hurt.