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

Post by trollbridge » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #9

ReptileMan wrote: post #6

Exept PGP could run on freely available hardware. What makes Mythos vulnerable is the centralization and scale of compute required and its proprietary nature. History shows that export controls fail on knowledge, but are damn effective on commercial products.

How so? 80% of Anthropic's revenue comes from outside the United States. There's no way to justify high capex, and US-personnel only research labs and pretend to keep the lead in AI at the same time. You either compete square and fair, or you're gonna stay behind.

Post by sroussey » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

achierius wrote: post #42

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…

I want to put this charitably, but you come out swinging by saying this is "over hyped"... You clearly don't work in a role dealing with attacks from these models. They've changed the game, and for the worse. Capabilities that used to be available only to nation-state attackers are legitimately commodified, or nearly so.

Post by sroussey » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

jwally wrote: post #34

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…

Post by raincole » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

Post by ivanovm » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:00 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…