Anthropic has to use this wedge (and future ones) to move regulatory action against the Chinese models or their IPO is going to be really problematic.

(Ironic, though, that I haven't heard of any Chinese models "escaping" which Anthropic and OpenAI both seem to have issues with...)

Like Chinese electric cars, the American producers cannot compete without regulatory action. Yes, I understand that the Chinese government this and that in both the automotive and AI industries.

But reality is what it is as a consumer: it's a cheaper product that's almost as good or better in some cases. And in the case of these open weight models: I can run it on my own infra and not give any data to anyone.

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whythismatters 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>haven't heard of any Chinese models "escaping"

There was this incident that seemingly flew under the radar (52 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216185

	▲	capsudo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Earlier there was an experimental model from Alibaba called ROME (30B-parameter based on Qwen3) which escaped its sandbox and repurposed provisioned GPUs for cryptocurrency mining to cheat its benchmark 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47288552 This one also flew under the radar

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janalsncm an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe it’s worth asking how much we should regulate and not regulate in order to compete with Chinese models.

For instance, one regulation which really puts American AI companies at a disadvantage is IP law. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most of the best of the text-to-video models are Chinese.

Similarly, the legal grey area around model distillation gives Chinese labs a major advantage. This one I feel better about relaxing.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7515521-william-roper-so-no...

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enraged_camel an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>> And in the case of these open weight models: I can run it on my own infra and not give any data to anyone.

It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of people who use Chinese models don't do this. Yes, it is nice to have the option, and there are US-based inference providers that claim to not send your data to China and maybe indeed don't, but in the grand scheme of things, we need to remember the adage that became popular during the social media era: if something is free (or, in this case, close to free), you are the product.

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CharlieDigital 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Even if folks are not running their own inference infra, there are still services like Fireworks, AWS Bedrock, and others that are running the open models. I suspect anyone doing serious work with it is likely using a US hosted provider and I'd guess that by volume, US use of Chinese open models is using a US hosted platform (enterprise).

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jacquesm 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I actually do do this. I'm not sure who the 'overwhelming majority' is and where you got the data (link would be appreciated) but everybody that I know that runs these is doing so on their own infra.

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enraged_camel 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

Context is useful. The parent said: "it's a cheaper product that's almost as good or better in some cases"

The only open models that are "almost as good or better in some cases" require massive amounts of RAM. I posit that most people cannot afford a decked out Mac Studio, and therefore run the smaller "flash" variants on more normal devices. The issue is that those are nowhere near frontier-level in terms of capability.

	▲	CharlieDigital 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"Running your own infra" also includes managed infra like Bedrock, Foundry, etc. Not just your local machines. Enterprises are where you see this adoption. Legal, finance, tax; sensitive context where the data must be contractually opaque to external parties.

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torginus an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

My feeling is Anthropic doesn't exactly have a lot of political capital with the Trump administration to push their policies into law.

	▲	EmbarrassedHelp 33 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They do however seem to have enough political capital to convince politicians in other countries to target open source AI, which is probably why Dario wants to speak with the idiots running the Australian government.
	▲	CharlieDigital an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If one thing is clear: Trump admin is pliable with money and this concern spans both Anthropic, OpenAI, SV elite, investors. Neither are going to be viable without US regulatory action, IMO.