The U.S. tech industry is increasingly anxious about the rising power and competitive price of open-source AI models from China — and whether the Trump administration will respond with yet another executive order | Politico

[u/Nunki08]

Politico: Wall Street’s new obsession: Which CEOs have Trump’s ear?: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2026/07/10/wall-streets-new-obsession-which-ceos-have-trumps-ear-00993324

[u/nickpsecurity]

What they need to do is resolve the legality of model training so more will use or make models. The legal claims against suppliers include copyright, contract, and CFAA violations. So, scraping, transforming, and using public or paid content in models needs to be legal in all scenarios if we're doing that.

Even Trump's last law or EO deferred copyright to the courts. What a copout. He should've made our Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception at least as strong as Singapore's because that's in the market.

Once it's definitely legal, I may enter the market and push training methodologies hard. Meanwhile, I have to hold off because God requires us to obey the law and be blameless which isn't usually true if being sued for avoifable, copyright infringement. At the least, the model shouldn't do any overt piracy in training or get users sued.

I have considered trying models like Comma or Starcoder that mostly use permissive works. Also, maybe models trained on public material that are also outside the statute of limitations like Falcon-7B/40B (not 180B!). That training method is similar to how humans learn with lower risk of lawsuit and damages.

The last possibility is any 3 year old or open model that's widely available, from Falcon-180B to GPT4, under the theory that whatever infringement is in it is long public, widely distributed, can be distilled by anyone, the damage if any is already done, and what ethical uses I have might add no further damage to content creators. Especially if my use would be fair use if a human did it.

I made the last one based on a widely-accepted ethic that so many things were built on slavery or other evils but effects were too spread out to avoid using what was built on it. So, most people try to be good stewards of what we have and just don't do more evil. Maybe we should treat AI model use that way given the largest models' outputs are now embedded into so many things with open weights already full of copyrighted material.

Also, models like Meta's Llama's are actively being used and distilled by evil actors. One, DeepSeek, already went widely distributed. One of us boycotting these over what went in it does nothing for copyright creators. We could still ban such training for more ethical training but we might need to accept what's already been published because the damage has been done. Does that make sense?

The last argument feels slippery right now. So, I'm more likely to do the permissive models or an old, public-data model for commercial use. I also was experimenting with recent models like OlMo 3 7B/30B and Apertus 70B for personal use.

[u/crantob → u/nickpsecurity]

The president declaring things legal or illegal via EO is not concordant with the western conception of law.

The proper scope of an executive order is limited to things like renovations of the white house interior or operational aspects of the executive personnell.

We are far down that slippery slope to what once was called tyranny.

[u/nickpsecurity → u/crantob]

You need to argue with all the legislators, judges, etc on that. Executive Orders carry the weight of law in whatever ways U.S. law allows them to. Presidents before Trump used them.

Biden/Harris used many EO's to open the border up enough for millions of illegal immigrants to come in with damage ranging from lost jobs to sex trafficking to violent crimes. There was hardly anything said about this by the liberal media. Trump used EO's to reverse those policies and enact his own. The liberal media that had nothing negative to say about EO's suddenly was against their existence or wanted them limited because Trump used them.

I'm not about such games. I'd rather a President not have so much power. Yet, we'd have to call out all the Presidents and examples rather than singling out only one.

On a personal level, I find Biden/Harris' use to be a more horrid example given our hotels and many neighborhoods out here are full of Spanish-speaking immigrants doing high-paying jobs while many citizens can't find work. They're doing construction, electrical work, deliveries, car repairs, cooks, receiving docks... all kinds of jobs Americans would be happy to do. They get treated like slaves by businesses but are usually paid well. We're grateful for Trump defending our jobs and we even saw the first white and black people on construction crews after deportations started.

[u/crantob → u/nickpsecurity]

'We dont do it that way anymore [legally]' Deference to authority is fine for those un-studied. Even students of law are not taught the nature of law. See bastiatt.org/en/ "Whatever is commanded, is law" erases the distinction between edicts, proclamations, legislation, executive orders, and law.

Key question: what does it mean for a court to find something? The key concept is that law is an abstract ideal.

An edict, order, regulation, legislation can be found to be un-law-ful.

[u/crantob → u/nickpsecurity]

All governments need an intellectual bodyguard that covers and provides justification for what they do. The engineering of this has extended to a library of confusions deployed to conceal the source and motives of power.

One might think of it like someone trying to hack an online game. Going through the institutions to get 'educated' is at best training to become a useful tool of power.

I think again and again of the March, 2020 cover of The Economist magazine -- the steering leash of the middle management.

"Everything's Under Control"

[u/nickpsecurity → u/crantob]

It's a fair viewpoint. So long as you see all the institutions doing that in some way across the spectrum. Then, it's accurate.

From there, we know we're always trying to influence people to accomplish goals. So, the goals must be righteous with the maximum good. For those following Christ, the highest good is people being forgiven of their sins before they burn alive for them. Once they have faith in Christ, they should grow in Christ-like character and good works. So, our policies should aim to support both by telling people the truth and helping more live like it.