Honestly speaking, this is an old trick by the government. They see AI (LLM) as a nuclear weapon which, in my opinion, outside of hallucinations, malicious prompt injections, and AI psychosis, is not an actual threat.

The reason I think Anthropic is doing this—preventing distillation and making distillation way harder for China—is that if you geoblock this and have strict rules around proxies, it works. I can't imagine Dario Amodei not knowing the consequences of his own policies.

As for open-source models, have you ever tried a distilled Claude Sonnet model (lordx64/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.7-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-IQ4_XS-GGUF)? I did via Hugging Face, and they are quite shit; they are very slow and eat up your VRAM. Open-source models have a long way to go to catch up to closed models.

So everyone saying we should use open-source models—that will never happen. For example, macOS is closed-source and Linux is open-source. Which one has a greater market share? macOS does, because of its privacy and security. "Let's wait and see how this works out. This sucks for enterprises and customers outside of the USA, but with a policy like 'America First,' you can expect this from any president in the White House.