Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#981

Post by ericmay » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

ngl999 wrote: post #897

echaozh wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm. Because they're not? But the American government and Anthropic don't want American models to be used by the Chinese. Anthropic is notorious for its effort to tell if the user is within China.

China is taking the moral high ground when Anthropic bans users from China. But if Anthropic didn't do it, the GFW would have surely banned Anthropic because Claude will say lots of things that do not agree with the official narrative.

[dead]

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#982

Post by waterTanuki » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 11:57 PM UTC

capevace wrote: post #350

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be? 1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models? 2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway 3. it’s not stopping distil…

The argument is that it will make $OAI and $ATHR billions of dollars because U.S. customers with deep pockets will have nowhere to go but the "vetted as safe and verified model providers" aka the duopoly. No one with two brain cells to rub together takes anything they or the current U.S. government has to say at face value.

This is a tale as old as the industrial revolution. I can only hope people see the trick for what it is this time.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#983

Post by tracker1 » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

capevace wrote: post #350

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be? 1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models? 2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway 3. it’s not stopping distil…

The only possible legit argument for blocking Chinese models is to force US orgs to use US based providers/models. And despite the fact that I and a lot of others cannot or should not use Chinese based models, they should be generally available as much as anyone in any other nation has access.

It's a lot like the guards against dealing with security issues.. I'd rather they be found and fixed then to try to stop people from being able to discover in the first place. I mean, where does that stop, do we let AI security scanners not tell you you have a SQL injection for fear someone might exploit it? They already can and they might use something else that tells them as much.