TikTok wasn’t open source and able to be run on your own hardware. Banning Alibaba’s models (or even a personal fork of them) running on your machines seems hard to defend in court.
The two main bills I'm aware of are the Decoupling America's AI Capabilities from China Act and No Adversarial AI Act. The former would have made it illegal for any American citizen to simply use DeepSeek. I couldn't find any lobbying data, but the obvious effect is that Americans would be forced to pay for more expensive domestic alternatives.
A House committee also recently probed Cursor and Airbnb for using Chinese models, rather than more expensive American alternatives. A sexagenarian Congressman gave a nonsense quote that he certainly did not come up with himself,[1] which sounds very similar to language Anthropic uses in its marketing materials.[2][3]
Moolenaar's quote: "The AI models these companies use are trained by China’s censorship regime and introduce hidden vulnerabilities that put Americans’ data and businesses at risk." That is, Americans using Chinese-trained AI models are exposed to some form of cybersecurity risk.
That's not really a threat model described in either of the Anthropic posts you share, which mainly talk about the risks of allowing authoritarian regimes to use powerful US-trained models, and the geopolitical risks of authoritarian countries developing strong AI before democratic/liberal countries do.
Is there any SCOTUS precedent for this? It seems like a huge 1A issue for the government to limit self hosted access to a foreign country’s LLM.
After what happened to TikTok, I don't think it's a stretch.
TikTok wasn’t open source and able to be run on your own hardware. Banning Alibaba’s models (or even a personal fork of them) running on your machines seems hard to defend in court.
Know where I can read about that?
The two main bills I'm aware of are the Decoupling America's AI Capabilities from China Act and No Adversarial AI Act. The former would have made it illegal for any American citizen to simply use DeepSeek. I couldn't find any lobbying data, but the obvious effect is that Americans would be forced to pay for more expensive domestic alternatives.
A House committee also recently probed Cursor and Airbnb for using Chinese models, rather than more expensive American alternatives. A sexagenarian Congressman gave a nonsense quote that he certainly did not come up with himself,[1] which sounds very similar to language Anthropic uses in its marketing materials.[2][3]
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/04/29/2026/house-committee-p...
[2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/updating-restrictions-of-sale...
[3] https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
Moolenaar's quote: "The AI models these companies use are trained by China’s censorship regime and introduce hidden vulnerabilities that put Americans’ data and businesses at risk." That is, Americans using Chinese-trained AI models are exposed to some form of cybersecurity risk.
That's not really a threat model described in either of the Anthropic posts you share, which mainly talk about the risks of allowing authoritarian regimes to use powerful US-trained models, and the geopolitical risks of authoritarian countries developing strong AI before democratic/liberal countries do.