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- Hacker News
- These controls are impossible to enforce. Users find ways around, compliant businesses lose.by Holacc
- 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...
by jwally - Sounds like Chinas play with solar panels.by sroussey
- Techcrunch is so trash today[0]. If this author seriously believes PGP (a small local program) is remotely comparable to Mythos, they should be kept away from writing anything about tech.
[0]: I know it has never been excellent in terms of quality, but still...
by raincole - Having gone through encryption export control I came to conclusion that preventing export of technology was never the goal.
By choke-pointing commercial efforts to export cryptographic tech the NSA got a perfect view and control lever of expertise export and transfer.
My hunch is that while deploying An algorithm is easy, deploying a system that is actually secure as a whole end to end requires a lot know how.
Bottom line it’s a bot naive to think that NSA is simultaneously very capable at being an omnipresent spy and is so stupid to not recognize that export controls have obvious holes.
by DenisM - I don’t think the point is to actually control exports.
They are just trying to get even with anthropic for trying to control the us military use of their technology.
This was just the easiest way to do it with anthropics incredibly stupid self own.
by daft_pink - 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.
Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung and SK Hynix, but their next generation 950 series (fabbed by SMIC) will use memory (fabbed by CXMT), not using the HBM standard, but by necessity their own HiBL and HiZQ standards.
HBM depends on ever wider memory bus widths to increase bandwidth, which in turn depends on SOTA TSMC manufacturing nodes for bus density. Huawei found a different way, using their LinqQu interconnect/switching tech to aggregate the bandwidth of individually slower memory chips resulting in an aggregate 4TB/sec bandwidth on par with HBM3e.
Trump has blocked Fable for export, but China (Ziphu) already has GLM-5.2 knocking on the door of the US frontier models, despite being developed with one hand tied behind their back. GLM-5.1 had only scored 18% on DeepSWE, but GLM-5.2 coming 11 weeks later, scores 48%, about on par with GPT 5.5. What's next ?!
- Aren't the controls meant to funnel money to his bank or crypto accounts?
- > but GLM-5.2 coming 11 weeks later, scores 48%, about on par with GPT 5.5. What's next ?!
It depends how good the US labs get at stopping distillation of their models.
by philjohn - >> 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 is why China brings them up at every meeting and asks for them to be relaxed. It's really hurting them domestically - they have to rely on smuggled SOTA chips for any meaningful advancements while they wait for their domestic capabilities to ramp up (which will take years).
- Should at least throw a reference to OpenBSD publishing the entire Blowfish crypto algorithm on a t-shirt and selling it -- so successful the blowfish became the project mascot.by dbt00
- The article and most HN comments here understandably talk about failed export control when the target audience is individual users. But export controls are actually fairly successful when their target is employees within a company. Go to an AI hardware company like Nvidia (or even Google which builds TPUs), and you’ll find that specific internal projects involve export controlled knowledge and can only be staffed by U.S. citizens, not foreigners. And employees naturally take this seriously without circumvention attempts because their job is on the line. This is the kind of quiet export control that stopped plenty of people successfully, but it’s just not visible to the world.by kccqzy
- 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.
by ReptileMan - 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.
by epolanski - 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 some people would set up "proxy servers" to allow access (either for montetary gain or because they don't agree with the restrictions)
by mfuzzey - 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.by trollbridge
- They can restrict it to US citizens only: just do KYC and enforce it. Any citizen exporting ITAR capabilities would be committing a felony.
I think it is inevitable that more capable models will require export controls, KYC, background checks, verification of credentials, etc. Even if you don’t buy Anthropic’s marketing of their current models, there is a future where models are capable of developing chemical weapons, biological weapons, cyber weapons, etc. which are genuine security threats governments will care about controlling and preventing. Maybe this prevents big commercial labs from developing more capable models until they figure out appropriate safeguards, but this is a good thing, a world where you can ask an LLM for an airborne rabies genome and it will simply produce it for you is not a world we should want to live in.
by variadix - > Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch
No, that actually means something went well - my adblocker saved me from being blasted by distracting, deceitful, dangerous content.
Pro tip: reader mode bypasses this aggressive “go away” banner.
- NoScript is a layer that makes my experience on the internet so much better.by braiamp
- 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 from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own. So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues, etc. Of course, there will be US-based actors willing to resell access, just like there are US-based actors willing to re-ship export-controlled hardware to Iran. And they will probably keep getting arrested every now and then.
The thing that's silly about this situation isn't that export controls on technology can't work, it's that it's overhyped technology and that Anthropic painted themselves into that corner by pretending it's as dangerous as nukes. Add to this a mercurial and petty administration and you have a pretty predictable outcome.
by zerobees - > Mythos is a service you buy from a US company ... So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues
Do you think AWS or Microsoft would be so dominant in cloud services and office productivity if the previous administrations had banned them for non-us firms?
In my opinion no, and all across the world we would be using non-us tech.
Precisely because it's a service, the US have the interest make the rest of the world continue to send their data to them.
by vb-8448 - 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.by achierius
- > 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
by NooneAtAll3 - 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 research labs desperately need the top talent they can get globally, not just MIT-bred Leetcode ninjas.
The only way US can have a lead is by competing globally as it always had in the tech sector (albeit it resorted to export controls to assert its dominance over China), not by changing the rules of the game and with protectionism.
by epolanski - 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 to make using it difficult for American companies, not everyone else. It would be a stupid protectionist measure that would only hurt the US - so I fully anticipate the admin would try it.
by Sanzig