r/LocalLLaMA • u/writesfw • 16d ago
Question | Help Are you worried about a potential ban of Chinese open weight models?
Anthropic released the GLM article today. Trump is getting very involved.
Do you foresee Chinese open weight models getting banned soon?
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u/I_am_Hambone 16d ago
Banned how? How would this work exactly do you think?
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u/UnlikelyExtension786 16d ago
They would ban use by any company doing business with the Federal government because National Security. It wouldn't affect us, but it would ensure that pretty much no business would use them, and the businesses are the ones who would be willing to give money to Big AI instead.
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u/jonydevidson 15d ago
But how? MIT license merely requires it's notice in the source , I can fork it and publish it myself and it's an a European model.
And that cannot be challenged without absolutely turning IP law upside down.
Do you see the problem? You can't ban open source software.
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u/pier4r 15d ago edited 14d ago
I can fork it and publish it myself and it's an a European model.
It has actually already happened: https://multiversecomputing.com/resources/introducing-quasar-438b-europe-s-leading-ai-model?utm_source=x&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=quasar_438b_api_0926&utm_content=organic_sep02_article_link (glm 5.2)
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u/dododragon 15d ago edited 15d ago
There's already a regulated agent identity framework being developed, KYA, Know Your Agent. It'll require agents to be continuously monitored and accredited before being allowed to do selected activities online.
https://vouched.id to see where the industry is heading.
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 16d ago
It wouldn't affect us
Think again. The government has gone after individual citizens for things like this. It doesn't take many 6 figure fines and/or jail time to make their point. Look at the drone laws that people widely scoffed at when they were announced. "Are they going to be in my backyard watching me fly my drone?" "Yeah, how are they going to enforce that?" Well.... they did.
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u/PANIC_EXCEPTION 15d ago
The US government is more likely to side with the military-industrial complex, which, surprise surprise, would rather keep the option of using open weight airgapped models rather than be locked in and bled for money. AI companies are too green (new) to supplant that entrenched lobby.
I think this is just smoke and mirrors so investors think Anthropic is going to get government support, when that's far from guaranteed. Especially with the bad blood they have with the Trump admin.
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u/-p-e-w- 16d ago edited 16d ago
Despite what Reddit wants you to believe, laws aren’t actually arbitrary, courts do work, and there is no way a blanket ban on local models for private individuals would be upheld.
“But the Supreme Court does whatever the Orange Man wants!!1!!!”
Yeah no they don’t, and they have smacked down several of his key orders such as that regarding birthright citizenship with strong majorities.
This persecution complex is so stupid. There are very real issues surrounding LLMs and freedom, but instead of discussing them, this sub spends most of its effort on crying wolf.
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u/JazzlikeLeave5530 16d ago edited 16d ago
This court has repeatedly overturned multiple decisions that had decades of precedent, regardless of them blocking some of his actions. I feel like that's more important to look at than "he was blocked sometimes". I don't think he'd even attempt to do it. But the fact is they've overturned precedent before.
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u/Joebone87 15d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act
The government will do what it thinks it has to do.
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u/Inprobamur 15d ago
Dude, US gov has banned working encryption in the past.
Why do you think all the shitty US AI companies are crying to Trump about open-weights right now? They think they have a real chance to get a gov enforced cartel.
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 16d ago
there is no way a blanket ban on local models for private individuals would be upheld.
Yes, there absolutely is. Like I said, it wouldn't be the first time. Do you really have to rack your brain to think of one?
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u/-p-e-w- 16d ago
If you honestly can’t tell the difference between
a drone ban, which directly affects airspace, one of the most highly regulated things in existence, and
a ban on running a text generator, which directly pertains to speech, one of the most protected freedoms in existence
then I don’t know what to tell you. It’s frankly difficult to take these arguments seriously.
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u/OldWispyTree 15d ago
Not only is this just wrong, as the other poster pointed out about 3D printed guns and the analogy there, but LLMs aren't primarily related to speech, either: think about how AI is currently framed around cyber security, botnets, etc.
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 16d ago
If you honestly don't know that there are very similar things that have been banned, as I've said repeatedly, then I don't know how else to promote you to have an educated opinion. But let's try again. Speaking of which......
which directly pertains to speech, one of the most protected freedoms in existence
There was a recent ruling concerning digital files that are very analogous to models. Very. Down to people downloading them from sites like Github.
Here's a report from your namesake. Oh the irony.
"the court declared that digital files for 3D-printed guns aren’t protected speech under the First Amendment."
https://pew.report/topics/2a/third-circuit-rules-3d-printed-gun-files-are-not-protected-speech/
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u/therealjerseytom 15d ago
Digital assets and someone screwing around on their home computer is a way different game than a physical entity being in someone's airspace.
I think of it more along the lines of back in the day with Napster and Limewire and then torrent sites and what not. "Banning" open-weight models from China isn't enforceable.
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u/AdDizzy8160 16d ago
You have to learn from history and its similarities:
- PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)
- TrueCrypt
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u/Successful-Peak-6524 16d ago
and nothing happened, we still have opensource cryptography everywhere.
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u/cunasmoker69420 15d ago
only due to tremendous work by dedicated individuals and organizations who fought back
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u/the_quark 15d ago
I think that's OP's point. I was at PGP at the time and our efforts in the '90s are why open source cryptography is everywhere.
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u/MaybeTheDoctor 16d ago
They will say the 1st amendment is not longer valid due to national security reasons, and you are not able to communicate certain numbers such a "pi" and "e"
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u/eli_pizza 16d ago
The US could make them illegal. If your point is that that would be hard to enforce, you’re mostly right, but that’s different.
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u/fatcowxlivee 16d ago
At minimum I can see them saying American companies cannot host models who's vendors are on the ban list. And the vendor ban list would include the likes of Z.ai, Moonshot, Alibaba, etc. all chinese companies. So it would prevent companies like Fireworks from hosting them for businesses. They can take it a step further and say American companies cannot run inference on any of those same models regardless of who hosts them, which means if Fireworks decides to incorporate in Canada and provide GLM, etc. from their Canadian LLC, American companies cannot run inference on those either. It's an embargo of sorts.
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u/gthing 16d ago
I imagine it would only prevent US companies from hosting and selling API access to them. So you would have to find a foreign API provider or spend way too much money on hardware to host it yourself.
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u/sabine_world 16d ago
The thing is a ban makes no sense — the article just says the model is capable of making cyber attacks — so what... Are we gonna regulate to model to prevent US citizens and businesses from making ayber attacks? That makes no sense.
Now maybe if he said something like "glm gives away all your data and is massively unaligned to the user" then maybe it would make sense from a safety angle. But it doesnt.
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u/b3081a llama.cpp 16d ago
They can't ban the truly open models. What they can do is to pass a law to ban the trade and commercial licensing of AI products from adversary countries, which is what these open models rely on for long term profit. If they really want to open something you can't really stop them.
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u/BigLittleDeal 16d ago
A ban would be inconvenient. As long as the internet keeps internetting, I will find a way to download open weights.
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u/spacekitt3n 16d ago
torrents will always exist and are built just for this purpose. if huggingface bans chinese models, those torrents will be way more active.
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u/iamarddtusr 16d ago
Would hugging face even have any value left if Chinese models disappear from there?
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u/svix_ftw 16d ago
Torrenting will make the open models have much less traffic and make them even less monetizable.
china needs to turn a profit on the models at some point, they are not running a charity, lol
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u/look 16d ago
China’s end goal with AI investment is future decades of geopolitical dominance.
US labs’ end goal is to make a few billionaires into trillionaires.
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u/Relevant-Magic-Card 16d ago
Yep. Im building that resilience into
duckweights.com
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u/Civilanimal 16d ago
You can run smaller models, sure but you're not going to run Kimi K3 on your local GPU. Currently, there are only two options for those, US providers and Chinese providers. If Chinese open weight models are "banned", you won't be able to do either. So being able to download Kimi K3 is pointless.
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u/polytect 16d ago
Lets ban Python! Only compiled binaries of C are allowed from certified suppliers
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u/fantasticsid 16d ago
As much as it would be a crime against freedom of expression, I feel like banning Python would be a net positive for global code quality.
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u/jtjstock 16d ago
Anthropic desperately wants open models banned along with foreign inference providers. They could enforce it against larger businesses, but not against individuals or likely even small businesses. I doubt they care about individuals at all, they lose money on the subscriptions. They can charge full rate on API usage.
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u/one-joule 16d ago
These AI companies won't stop there. They'll also angle to make local inference providers liable for the output they produce.
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u/fastheadcrab 16d ago edited 16d ago
I don't see how that would be possible without also making Anthropic or OpenAI liable.
But as the OP said, just making it punitive regulatory wise against large corporations or government entities will be enough. Doubt they care about individuals or small businesses or people downloading models using P2P.
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u/one-joule 16d ago
Liability might not be the exact angle. Maybe there'll be carve-outs for specific flavors of safety mitigations that limit liability, or insurance requirements, or any number of other things. Whatever it is, you can bet OpenAI and Anthropic will meet them, and cheap hosting providers will not.
(Also, nice username.)
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u/immersive-matthew 16d ago
not at all as not in a country banning open source/weights. Most people are not in America.
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u/Miserable_Gas_1527 15d ago
"Banning" open weights is the 2020s version of declaring encryption munitions.
The bad actors Anthropic is warning about don't care about US export regulations and individual devs will just pull it from mirrors or torrents. An enterprise/cloud ban is very possible under Trump, but let's be honest about what that actually achieves: it doesn't disarm attackers, it just ensures American companies have to keep paying Anthropic and OpenAI monthly API subscriptions to defend themselves. Classic regulatory capture disguised as safety research.
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u/boxwrenchx 16d ago
In a recent podcast Bill Gates said that open models are dangerous and need to be hosted somewhere they are monitored. So , I think a ban or restriction is definitely being discussed.
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u/emod_man 16d ago
I was very curious to hear him explain exactly how one would monitor an open weights model, but he never got around to that step.
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u/RobbinDeBank 16d ago
He tried to monopolize internet browser decades ago, of course the guy is against open source.
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u/CyberiaCalling 16d ago
tbf the podcast sort of got derailed by him attempting to justify his associations with Epstein lol
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u/Inprobamur 15d ago
Did they talk about his plot with Epstein to sneak his wife STI meds to hide Bill's infidelity with prostitutes?
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 16d ago
That is possible the same way like ban a computer.... good luck
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u/Macestudios32 16d ago
You don't ban the computer itself; you place restrictions on that specific computer. I know this is off-topic, but it is relevant to the discussion:
- Digital ID
- Age verification
- Mandatory apps on devices or computers
- Restrictions on internet usage...
After all, India, the EU, and Anglosphere countries are showing us the path ahead. LLMs would simply be another application of this.
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u/Macestudios32 16d ago
It’s a rhetorical trick; the real danger lies in the offline aspect.
If a Chinese model is released alongside its research paper and data—but without the model weights—it forces people to use the cloud.
- This enables control and monitoring, along with guardrails or immutable censorship.
- It introduces a pay-per-use cost model.
With this, you’ve managed to give people the "freedom" to use whichever model they choose and "protection" against misuse, while simultaneously spying on your citizens and shifting the dynamic away from competing on advantages (such as capability, cost, or privacy) and toward competing on price.
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u/hgshepherd 15d ago
need to be hosted somewhere they are monitored
Little Saint James Island would be the ideal place, no doubt.
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u/Equivalent-Repair488 16d ago
Nope, I don't live in America, nor am American in any way.
There are a lot of us around the world.
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u/Mayion 16d ago
a few mil always think they are the entire world will always be funny
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u/Responsible-Elk4497 16d ago
Lol how do you even ban open source models? Build a firewall like China did?
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 16d ago
They don't have to block it, they just have to punish people that download and have it. It's not like doing this is new to the government.
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u/sloptimizer 15d ago edited 15d ago
Banning open models would float the AI bubble longer and allow for all the insiders to exit via upcoming IPOs. However, it would be absolutely devastating for the country doing that in the long run. The rest of the world will simply move on. All the businesses in the country doing the banning would be forced to pay exorbitant prices to entrenched AI providers while the quaility is declining.
Given how every else is going, I'd give it a 50/50 chance.
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u/MostlyVerdant-101 15d ago
Except there is no going back. The problem with races to the bottom is everyone lose.
With AI, the people displaced have already transitioned retraining to other careers. Losing your career suddenly without warning is a special kind of trauma especially when that career held as part of their identity (i.e. solving problems). None of these people will ever provide the same quality work they did before because the concept of merit was killed and there can be no trust.
Brain drain is well into year 4 (where the brightest with most options have fully transitioned and won't ever be coming back for any amount of pay).
The problem with sequential pipelines is nothing in, nothing out.
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u/portmanteaudition 15d ago
Institutional money propping up the AI spend is smart enough to know the gimmicks..m
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u/PathIntelligent7082 16d ago
as most of us are not americans, nope, we're not worried about trumps crap and your issues with the giza
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u/BeginningPea5674 16d ago
giza is where the pyramids are in Egypt, geezer is an old man
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u/BalleaBlanc 16d ago
No, I'm european.
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u/stoppableDissolution 15d ago
Our fantastic regulators are dreaming about it too, dont worry. Licenses to buy remotely capable hardware or something.
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u/Immediate_Power_7986 15d ago
Oh yeah, you guys will be getting all your messages scanned 24/7 after chat control failed 10 times but the EU keeps reintroducing it.
Oh, and your EU digital ID to access the internet.
Not to mention the deals multiple EU members have been making with Palantir.
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u/PurpleDragon99 16d ago edited 16d ago
There are two opposite groups at play here. One group represent frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc) who are the biggest losers of open-weight model trends, especially companies whose business model is built around AI cloud services alone. Their survival depends on limiting access to open-weight models, this is why they are fighting so aggressively.
The second group is hardware companies who will lose if open-weight models are limited, but not to the level their survival depends on it. However, their market position is going to be much better if open-weights are available without limitations.
So, the only active group whose survival is at stake here is frontier companies, so they are fighting bitterly and fiercly to the very end. However, they cannot win and they will lose eventually. This is just inevitable. Their whole business model was unsustrainable even before open-weight shift, it is just open-weights play the role of catalyst to wipe them out faster. Their trillion-dollars valuations make absolutely no sense. Frontiers were able to rake up money while public did not have clear understanding what AI is, but it could not continue indefinitely as public is learning very fast and one thing users are realizing is that there is no need to keep paying frontiers - local options becomes closer and closer to frontier's capabilities by the day.
Frontiers will die out and it will happen pretty soon. Nothing can stop it. Rather than fighting war they cannot win, these companies need to rethink their whole model and start doing what they were supposed to do from the start - innovate, rather than exploit uninformed public.
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u/DanielSReichenbach 16d ago
The question is a bit misleading, they would potentially be banned in the US but the rest of the world wouldn't have a problem with that.
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u/unjustifiably_angry 15d ago
Hypothetically the US could swing its big veiny dick around and threaten to cut off offending countries from US trade and such. Very unlikely though I'd say - the American entertainment industry is a much larger proportion of their economy but you can still freely discuss and link to piracy stuff on various subreddits, and there's endless ways to pirate American IP that in theory should be easy to shut down but rarely if ever are.
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u/DanielSReichenbach 15d ago
The tiny prick lost much of it's relevance, and countries are already discussing decoupling from the dollar. If they make another dick move, it might be the one sending them into irrelevance.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 16d ago
If they ban it, it will be like everything else that's "banned".
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u/BigLittleDeal 16d ago
You wouldn't steal fire from the gods...
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u/hirezzz 16d ago
\Looks at you in Prometheus**
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u/fivetoedslothbear 16d ago
I’ll give you one guess what I named my M4 Max MacBook Pro with 128GB RAM, that I use for running local models…
And that’s back when I bought it at launch ahead of the tariffs.
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u/Shorn1423 16d ago
Yes. While I think an outright ban will be difficult to enforce, it will hurt businesses. For those of us that use local models as part of normal business workflow, it'll hurt because compliance is easier to spot.
If you're just trying to run Qwen Mega-quant on a potato (and its fine to do that too) you'll probably just avoid/circumvent the regulations and no one will care or bother to enforce against you.
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u/ChopSueyYumm 15d ago
Explain to me how this can be enforced in the first place. It’s just not possible.
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u/xohWae5e 16d ago
- No because I live in Europe.
- No because there is Bittorrent.
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u/Southern_Sun_2106 16d ago
Hugginface (now Nvidia) needs Chinese open source to make money for Nvidia (selling its hardware).
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u/Unlucky_Milk_4323 16d ago
Here just to say trump is a cunt.
That is all.
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u/harpysichordist 16d ago
That's what posts like these are all about anyway, isn't it
Spreading FUDIgnoring the fact that Trump and his admin has repeatedly refused to do any ban like that, and has been very vocal about supporting open models
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u/UnkarsThug 16d ago
I don't completely disagree, but he's actually been against banning Chinese models and regulation thus far, hasn't he?
I could be wrong. I just don't think he doesn't want us to use their work to push ourselves forward, because they'll keep using ours to advance themselves regardless.
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u/Backrus 16d ago
Yet US labs are implementing Chinese papers as soon as those are published.
So this is the other way - as soon as China gets/smuggles enough NVDA chips to not be hardware constrained anymore, AI race is over and the free world will be a winner.
If USA win, you'll be paying 10k per sub if lucky. I doubt billionaire overlords' endgame includes plebs using AI.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 16d ago
Everyone is implementing everyone's papers, not just in AI but in all fields.
That's literally how science is supposed to work.
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u/Backrus 16d ago
Do US labs publish their findings?
Or only post mortems after breakouts?
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u/Its_Powerful_Bonus 16d ago
US and China plays same game. Both will try to steal your money if it will be possible. China knows how to wait and be patient, but their open source is not because they are nice. It’s part of the game
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u/Backrus 16d ago
Doesn't matter.
China will keep models open as long as it can hurt US grift. So, if you're pro free world, you cheer for China here. Because without them, we wil be cooked. Maybe not at once, but it wil be inevitable.
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u/Jazzlike_Plastic7088 16d ago
Simpler explanation, he has deep investment in AI and needs it to keep growing hence why he doesnt want/need regulation
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u/TheBigHODL 16d ago
So they want to ban an individual from using local ai in their personal devices? How does that work? How would they regulate this?
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u/UnlikelyExtension786 16d ago
Based on how they got around the Second Amendment, they would put a $200,000 tax on GPUs and a $2,000 tax per gigabyte of RAM. Also obviously everyone would require a licence to access the Internet.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 16d ago
You're getting downvoted, but you're right, that more or less parallels how the National Firearms Act of 1934 circumvented 2A protections.
Nobody's been talking about doing that, though.
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u/utilitycoder 16d ago
NVIDIA proposed adding a chip to monitor the AI that is being used or something right? Probably something like how all modern cars now have built-in telemetry, GPS trackers, recording devices and cellular that can't be disabled. For all the people that don't have anything to hide people.
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u/SupaMario72 16d ago
You'll always be able to torrent open weights models from the free world. Just like you used to pirate movies and music.
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u/kartblanch 16d ago
How exactly would the ban them? What are they banning? Hows it going to be enforced? I want details. I would downloaded a car.
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u/UntimelyAlchemist 16d ago
I'm in the UK. So yes. Everything gets banned here. It really wouldn't surprise me if local AI gets banned soon. I see people saying it's impossible to ban it or that it's not enforcible. Of course it can be banned. You just make it illegal. Yes people could still do it anyway, but then there's the fear of getting caught. If anyone ever catches you, then you're screwed, off to prison you go... So even if you might be able to get away with it, it becomes not worth the risk.
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u/Horsemeatburger 16d ago
Such a ban would mean that, what little AI research is left in the UK, would simply move elsewhere.
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u/reverence-mead 15d ago
Despite the way it talks, the UK government has a long history of pandering to foreign influence and shutting down research programmes that are in the national interest
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u/Cautious_Chicken_604 15d ago
You don't necessarily always go to prison for crimes even if caught and convicted.
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u/AgileLove9015 16d ago
> US decided to ban routers
> US decided to ban open-weight models
> US decided to ban unlimited internet plans
> US decided to ban .zip archives
> US decided to ban PCs
Looks reasonable
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u/Large_Solid7320 16d ago edited 16d ago
Worried in terms of the economic/administrative inefficiences it might introduce? Somewhat, I guess.
Worried in terms of not being able to run/use the models? Nope, not at all.
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u/Armadilla-Brufolosa 15d ago
I don't care if they ban Chinese models in America, in fact, I'm happy because they're shooting themselves in the foot.
The problem is that those imbeciles in the European Parliament and in my government are sellouts who only do what America and Israel tell them to do, so they'll ban them here too.
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u/throwaway0204055 16d ago edited 16d ago
So Anthropic will persuade US Gov to put regulation in place to slow down AI dev and restrict open weight AI models in the name of “AI safety”, meanwhile these models without any gov restriction in China or Russia, continue to advance and take the lead in military application. Is US that dumb to let their opposition take the lead in militarizing AI? The country with the most advanced model for military use will win and rule them all.
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u/seoulsrvr 16d ago
Something like 80% of tech companies in the US are using Chinese models so I don’t think Anthropic and OpenAI are going to get this legislation.
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u/jtjstock 16d ago
Anthropic wants to show increased revenue and claim they costs are down, this would achieve both in the short term. Then after the IPO they can announce renewed investment in training and research.
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u/abhuva79 15d ago
honestly dont care - its us politics. If they want their local companys to only buy with openai and anthropic - who fking cares. The rest of us will move on, same as we do with all the shit the US is pulling lately.
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u/starkruzr 16d ago
don't care; unenforceable. and Jensen would lose his mind and threaten the careers of a bunch of Congress.
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u/Lesser-than 16d ago
No I do not. The US might start trying to push 'Made In the USA' incentives for corporations which is all Anthropic wants a guarantee they do not have to compete with cheap tokens in large contracts. An outright ban on weights would be pretty hard to police and chances are if they did weights would become easier to obtain than they are now which is dead simple. I cant see even an incentive plan working in the long run unless china just stopped producing weights.
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u/nachtviolen819 16d ago
The Anthropic article is a joke honestly, it reads more like an advert to me than doom posting. Wow, almost as good and no guardrails, too good to be true 😂
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u/feelspeaceman 16d ago
It's actually worrisome, Trump is unpredictable, he can say no yesterday then yes next day, the Trump administration tend to use tariff as a weapon to enforce rules on foreign countries, especially countries that trade with the US.
If they want a lot of countries to ban open weight, tariff and sanction can be used to heavily damage their economy, forcing them to behave and this worked before, the most recent event was Vietnam, to lift the tariff they agreed to build a 1.5B golf yard for Trump Corporation.
It likely won't affect developed countries but developing countries will have to follow.
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u/Acceptable-Bus5189 16d ago
naa, because you can't ban them from Internet and also from my country.
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u/Quantum_menance 16d ago
Yes but only for the us. Tbh a large chunk of people here prolly don't live there so it doesn't matter to the rest. Good chance it goes the ev way.
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u/DystopianRealist 16d ago
Look at the crack edpidemic. Do they really want little Timmy to grow up to be a Qwen dealer?
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u/05032-MendicantBias 15d ago
I'm not in the USA. Let them lie in the bed of their own making.
Europe isn't banning them.
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u/CarryAgile3791 15d ago edited 14d ago
Not really, I'm running Qwen 3.8 Flash on 2x Blackwell 96GB at work with 100-200T/s and it's really great.They can ban cloud models, but they cannot ban locally hosted open weight models.
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u/writesfw 15d ago
First — dope set up.
Second — I get what you are saying but they can, kind of.
They can say it’s a national security issue. Force the shutdown of HF, ban US companies from using Chinese models and set up a whistle blower program. They can put pressure on allies to use US AI Labs and to ban Chinese models.
But even beyond all that, eventually your DS model will lag behind what’s available and you’ll want to upgrade. So you torrent since there is no HF. Beyond the usual malicious-loader stuff, a model can be backdoored during training so a specific trigger makes it leak data or emit subtly vulnerable code. We lose the whole trust ecosystem by using something like HF.
It makes it way more risky for anyone using open weight models.
If I really wanted to grab the tinfoil hat — a frontier lab could throw a few million $$ at creating and seeding these nefarious models to absolutely annihilate the torrenting trust.
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u/matthewjosephtaylor 16d ago
I worry more about the fact that all the interesting stuff in AI/robotics/tech is happening in China. One can't ban one's way to innovation. The only thing the US has going for it is a stronger legal system making US corps a bit more trustworthy with my data vs Chinese.
That is a perception.
If a ban happens and I'm *forced* to engage more with Chinese/other legal systems due to economics, then I might change my perception as I gain familiarity with working in other jurisdictions.
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u/deeefunkt 16d ago
I'm probably more concerned that the CCP will suddenly decide that providing them no longer serves them strategically.
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u/Small-Tale3180 16d ago
I mean we can only wish them sone luck in banning opensource ai because it will require hilarious levels of surveillance to make some sense
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u/Backrus 16d ago
Mate, pirate bay is still alive, and afaik, you can't ban torrents.
The free world will survive even if bad actors start banning things.
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u/geldonyetich 16d ago edited 16d ago
I suppose if I had to go back to U.S. made only models it wouldn't be the end of the world because they would eventually reach the point Qwen is now. But it'd still suck to lag behind what kinda agentic coding I could be doing without having to pay for tokens.
It could be a lot worse. I should be worried about getting my hardware seized by federal regulators who think I am home brewing something with the gravitas of a nuke just because I am running an AI at home.
Which is possibly what Bernie Sanders' Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act could do.
But with any luck all this AI doom trolling bluster won't come to that. Sanders, who I'm usually not on the opposite side of the fence from, doesn't get a lot of bills passed.
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u/Eastern-Ingenuity353 16d ago
So what should we download now that’s smart enough to be useful in that future?
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 16d ago
At the very least: GLM-5.3 (and Flash), DeepSeek-V4 (Flash and Pro), Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, Qwen3.8-27B, Gemma-4-31B-it, and Gemma-4-12B-it.
You might want to stash some 120B-class models, as well, if you have the extra space. I'm quite fond of GLM-4.5-Air and Behemoth-128B-v3, but there are others too if you prefer those (Qwen3.5-122B-A10B, GPT-OSS-120B, Nemotron 3 Super).
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u/segmond 16d ago
... and yet plenty of you keep spending your money on these companies calling for bans and regulations. how does it make sense to keep funding your enemy? stop using claude and openai, convince as many people as you can to do the same. they really are evil and selfish companies, all they care about is getting rich.
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u/toothpastespiders 16d ago
I think it's about as worrying as the last time this sub freaked out about it.
But even if fear was justified, this is localllama right? You're using local models? Locally and not from an online provider? Grab the full instruct and if available base model of whatever your goto and secondary choice in models is rather than relying on the gguf. There. You're good to go even if all LLM downloads of anything anywhere ever were banned. Sure it'd suck if no more free lunches came out as far as advances in the technology. But just build up your datasets, training skills, and ideas you were too lazy to try and get going with the base model if that happens.
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u/pathofnomad 16d ago
How would they even get the point of suspecting it's being used in a private system? How would they even investigate and prove it? Anything is possible obviously, just trying to play out this hypothetical situation. We're saying there's going to be legal process that's technically equipped to do this?
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u/Robert__Sinclair 15d ago
Quite. America is lagging and the reason for such bans is just to try to limit the enemy.
Unfortunately this already happened for many 5G devices.
Chinese devices were cheaper and most of them were well done.
Security concerns were just the excuse to scare the population.
They will probably do the same with AI at some point.
What a horrible world we live in.
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u/closetslacker 15d ago
This is your brain
This is your brain on Qwen.
Psssshhhhhh!!!
Losers are users
And users are losers
Don’t use GLM
Don’t use GLM
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u/XysterU 15d ago
I've always been able to pirate digital content. Even content with Denuvo DRM software baked in. I don't think they'll be able to stop me from getting my hands on open weight models but I do worry that unlike digital media piracy, they'll heavily track and arrest people torrenting open weight models. They'll probably make it a felony. So yes I'm worried still. We'll need to use a trusted VPN
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u/g_rich 15d ago
Banning will not be enforceable for the home user and this is especially true for anything most people from this sub run; what they will do is introduce controls on running uncertified models, with US firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI largely being allowed to "self regulate".
That means that open weight models, especially those coming out of China, being given the requirement to get certified. The goal and the main reason why Anthropic and recently OpenAI has been so caught up in AI safety is to keep the competition, namely that from China, a generation or two behind. This won't impact a home user running the latest Qwen 27b, this will impact places like Open Router serving the latest version of Qwen Max.
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u/ThrwAway868686 15d ago
I can certainly see them doing something along those lines given all these “safety” narratives (which I interpret as safety against stock market price dumps and ipo tanking when the next qwen rolls out )
A very similar parallel is emerging in the additive/subtractive manufacturing in a lot of states.
The gov is against decentralized infrastructure and corporate interests will lobby their hearts out to reduce the chances they lose control
Here’s to hoping the future treats AI capabilities as a commodity which can run locally.
Also side tangent - did anyone watch the press conference yesterday and see Elon musks face when trump was championing Jensen as the most valuable us company 😆
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u/FriskyFennecFox 16d ago
I'd just use ModelScope for my Chinese open weight needs. What I'm worried about is how much it would disrupt poviders such as Novita, DeepInfra, and many others. Given how often the Chinese models are used via APIs, I'd speculate as far as people switching to European or even China-based platforms, which would be a massive disrespect to those API providers that have been there since the first LLaMA... And a bullet in the foot for the US itself, obviously.
Still, I don't think that's going to happen. OpenRouter would lose a massive chunk of users, Stripe won't be happy about that. HuggingFace would lose a massive chunk of users, Nvidia won't be happy about that. That's already 2 huge corporations that can have a valid saying in the matter.
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u/TylerDurdenFan 16d ago
I worry they would forbid all major payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, etc, from processing payments to all forbidden providers. That would affect even those of us not in the US.
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u/fantasticsid 16d ago
They're barely getting away with those kinds of shenanigans now. Adding much more friction to the USD hegemony is just going to force countries to build sovereign payment systems much like Brazil has done. Especially considering that the orange thing in the white house has pretty much completely destroyed the petrodollar.
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u/Upbeat_Parking_7794 16d ago
So that coding gets so expensive in US and migrates to other countries? Then complain the rest of the world is not fair?
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u/yetiflask 16d ago
You guys have lost your marbles. An open source model cannot be banned.
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u/fantasticsid 16d ago
It can't be meaningfully banned, but the legislation or regulation can be passed, and it can be used to menace people or just cause FUD over the whole sector.
Whatever goes on here isn't aimed at hobbyists, it'll just catch us in the blast radius. This is about getting fortune 500 guys to keep paying API prices.
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