If that happens it'll be an absolute disaster. Imagine a scenario where Anthropic and OpenAI prohibit most US companies from using their latest models because of safety.. And meanwhile attackers use equivalent open source models to attack US companies.
Any prohibition on open source models will do nothing to fix the problem.. since attackers will never feel bound to the law. All advanced models must be available for defensive purposes.
Right, but is there any evidence of intelligence behind any of these (government) decisions? It’s just regulatory capture + marketing (plus some people living out an imaginary fantasy that they’re in Neuromancer or something), absolutely no reason to think they won’t try and target open models as part of this.
There's at least one reason: much harder to make a profit in policing non-american companies and open-source models without huge (or even any) MRR.
If the real motive is profit, then open source models are likely simply not a viable means to that end.
OpenAI and Anthropic are already unable to make SOTA models generally available (and support this, oddly enough).
If huggingface or whatever is forced to take down open source licensed weights, there’s always bittorrent.
Export controls are one thing, but the US doesn’t really have import controls, and there’s no copyright issue, so DMCA, etc don’t come into play.
It’d take the courts years to decide how to contort the law to ban open weight models, and by then, it’ll be too late (and also pointless).
They did the same by banning strong encryption. Never underestimate the stupidity of politicians
And someone will start a competing company in a sane environment.
> since attackers will never feel bound to the law.
But that's the whole point.
Fall out of favor with the admin and you lose access to the good American models, aren't allowed to use Chinese ones, and fall prey to the attackers and behind your competitors.
It'd be less about "safety" and more "we've spent trillions developing these AI tools only to have the Chinese, once again, copy them and offer them for pennies on the dollar, and no one seems to care about the impact that has on the long-term sustainability of this sector of the American economy as a whole, so we're yanking the models."
"I'm going to take this box razor and make some really deep cuts around the middle of my face because my tech sector is too good and that's actually a bad thing because $foreigners."
I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing. I'm also not saying it's about foreigners at this point. It's about seeing a bet through. They've burned a metric crapload of capital on developing AI models and the infrastructure to host them. They want that money back and then some. Remember, the fine shareholders of OpenAI think that 100x returns just aren't reasonable and want that cap lifted. If this kind of thing continues, they'd be lucky to make their money back at all, let alone 100x.
Which would be fine, but as we know, people securitize the crap out of their investments these days, and least some people probably leveraged themselves on some US AI companies, so now the risk is spreading outside of the sector to the economy in general, which is made worse by the sheer amount of spending on AI.