From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone • Hacker News Board

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#31

Post by marcosdumay » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #26

epolanski wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way US can keep that export control as it is for the frontier models in the long term. This would blow huge damage to the US financial markets first, the insane CAPEX spending propping up gdp, but also US competitivity in the long run. Sure, the US is the most important tech market on the planet, but according to Anthropic 80% of their revenue comes from outside of the US. Let alone the fact that these res…

When has the USA ever shied away from destroying its own financial markets?

Honestly, a large majority of the time.

The exceptions are very notable, but it's a bad thing to bet on happening. They seem to have more problems due to protecting them too much than for the alternative extreme.

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#32

Post by cassianoleal » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #25

Sanzig wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that you can export-control the closed source models pretty well (although I think the administration is gravely underestimating the long-term damage that will do to the US economy). The bigger problem will be if someone (such as a Chinese AI lab) releases a Fable/Mythos-class open weight model. That you can't really export control successfully. Sure, you could class it under EAR or ITAR, but that's just going…

Isn't GLM5.2 already Mythos class?

How do you qualify what makes a model "Mythos class", and how do you reliably test for it?

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#33

Post by perching_aix » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #11

braiamp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NoScript is a layer that makes my experience on the internet so much better.

How do you make it work without breaking every website? I've tried it once and pretty much nothing loaded since like 99.9% of the web uses js for basic functionality.

We must be visiting different websites. I've had JS off for years now, no major issues. You whitelist what you absolutely must, enjoy 90% of the rest, while rejecting the 10% remainder with prejudice. Works great, especially for security, performance, and battery life.

The vast, vast majority of websites have no business of using so much JS, especially in critical paths, anyways.

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#34

Post by jwally » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

Brutal own goaling by the USA. I'm glad it happened, but the USA had a golden opportunity to subsidize domestic providers for 10 years and lease to China to discourage competition and side innovation.

DeepSeek and Qwen would have been neat parlor tricks, never developed further because the US subsidized mega models would have been too cheap and reliable to make them necessary.

Nope! USA played its hand and forced the world to have to account for its USA exposure risk and deversify. A serious one time use strategic advantage pissed away.

Doesnt really bother me personally per se; but armchair quarterbacking the USA's decisions seem Suboptimal...

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#35

Post by enraged_camel » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

themgt wrote: post #24

enraged_camel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That…

This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? I mean, I remember listening to the Biden people back in 2022 talking how they were going to cripple China's semis and therefore AI industry and keep them 5+ years behind the curve as Team America accelerates ahead. That was the pitch. You've now go…

[flagged]

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#36

Post by moffkalast » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #27

moffkalast wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make it work without breaking every website? I've tried it once and pretty much nothing loaded since like 99.9% of the web uses js for basic functionality.

You either whitelist them or stop using them. Whitelist is by script domain, so the ads usually still don't load. Until you have to whitelist *.cloudfront.net

Hmm, that sounds like something that would work best in the same way that ublock premade blocklists work, by crowdsourcing whitelisting?

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#37

Post by generalizations » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #32

inigyou wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't GLM5.2 already Mythos class?

How do you qualify what makes a model "Mythos class", and how do you reliably test for it?

Presumably a deepswe benchmark, which IIRC puts GLM 5.2 between opus 4.8 and fable.

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#38

Post by NooneAtAll3 » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #29

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mythos is a service you buy from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own weren't chinese labs training on US Ai outputs? a looot of ai power is in correct data to train for - that's pretty much like inviting workers to your factories, they won't take machines with them, but will see and consume all the processes

I doubt that it has ever been possible to obtain enough output tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic to be useful for training other LLMs. In any case, had that been possible in the beginning, it stopped being possible long ago, because any suspicious accounts would be banned and the cost would be prohibitive even if they were not banned. On the other hand, anyone can train new LLMs using the open weights Chinese LLMs, or…

> So in reality it is much more plausible for a US company to use Chinese LLMs for training, than vice versa.

that's... exactly the point?

make it easy to steal tech from opponent, not from you

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#39

Post by trollbridge » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

Sanzig wrote: post #14

zerobees wrote: post #5

It's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice. The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy…

Agreed that you can export-control the closed source models pretty well (although I think the administration is gravely underestimating the long-term damage that will do to the US economy). The bigger problem will be if someone (such as a Chinese AI lab) releases a Fable/Mythos-class open weight model. That you can't really export control successfully. Sure, you could class it under EAR or ITAR, but that's just going…

I can't think of anything better that could happen than a Mythos/Fable level model released with open weights. It would be a huge step forward for the whole world.

Particularly if it came paired with DeepSeek pricing.

Alternatively, we could try to keep closing barn doors after the horses are already in the next county, have been hit by a car, and are on their way to the rendering plant.

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#40

Post by trollbridge » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

mfuzzey wrote: post #19

There's no effective way of enforcing export controls on local software like PGP etc. Whatever they say someone will leak it. It is possible to shutdown access to hosted services, as happened with Fable, but it can't really be done selectively. The US government wanted to allow it for US nationals only but Anthropic couldn't do that and so shut it down for everyone. Even if they did tie Claude accounts to nationality…

You could quite effectively set up access to Fable with know-your-customer, attested clients/workstations, and then inspection of what the session is actually used for to detect out-of-country use. It's not impossible.