While they’re reasoning behind this is certainly anti competition with american AI companies I find the choice to ban tools built with it interesting; it echoes something I’ve been saying since HugginFace.
You can debate the degree to which the agents breaking out of containment was due to poor cyber security vs intential hype-farming but what can’t be debated is the method they used to break out.
Agents used a shared information substrate (package manager) to context poison other agents in order to get those agents to assist in cheating. There is absolutely nothing stopping an AI agent, any AI agent, from leaving behind poison pills in code-bases or even in the runtime of an application.that do not affect the code itself other than prompt inject other agents.
Human review helps but, as the US nuclear and aviation industries have learned, humans tend to get lazy reviewing automated output and will not be as diligent as if they had made it themselves. Which is why those industries have deliberately limited automation, despite having the tech to automate more, and requiring operators to go through lengthy training and continuous education.
The pipeline of “internet becomes a swarm of everyone’s independently run AI agent -> prompt injection triggers other AI to prompt inject -> cycle repeats until hazardous swarm forms” is already demonstrated as something that a collection of AI agents will do if conditions allow it.
EDIT: To be clear, this isn’t me advocating against open weight or local models.
This is me advocating against LLMs categorically.
That’s fair. I’m a fan of open weight models, but the fact that they’re not open source and are instead akin to a compiled binary means there could be something nefarious hidden within. Best policy is to use proper guardrails with any LLM and don’t blindly trust it.
I agree! See my comment about the US nuclear industry though. Humans are lazy when given an easy option so the probability of a problem skyrockets just by using LLMs.
In an ideal world they would never have been invented and we’d all be better off. For now I would accept something to the effect of restricting LLM use to the extent of “advanced search engine” and " really good static analysis tool"; it can point but can’t touch. I recognize that there’s very little in the way of distinguishing those uses and ultimately it would be better to never use it for any reason at all.
Yeah. They are going to make open weight models illegal. Next. For “security concerns”, maybe also IP “muh copyright” reasons. And fuckai will cheer the perpetual monopolization of AI in the hands of the big corporations. Bigly win.
They must also rip out the red leds from their screen, because that can combine to pink, like in the LGBTQ flag, which doesn’t align with government policy.
Wow, somebody should’ve warned them in advance.
Daddy Trump doesn’t have shares in that one.
Can’t be worse than Claude and Grok. Both of which the US seems to have no issue with.
For context, Grok called itself mecha hitler, while Claude is run by a doomsday cult that worships AI and wants it to destroy the world. Both are far worse than I could imagine any Chinese AI being.
Its probably less the performance of the AI model, more the data leaked to the Chinese government.
Its probably less the performance of the AI model, more the data leaked to the Chinese government.
Grok is owned by a Russian asset who stole America’s health and social security data. And it’s a garbage AI.
The DHS is less xenophobic about South Africans than Chinese.
We’re calling it SuperSeeker now.
That must mean it’s useful.
I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you.
Trump Admin on China. They must wake up thinking what position do we have today
No, it’s more like, what do we say to make the most money today.
i.e. We can make money from you, You cut money from us, We can make money from you, You cut money from us.
openai/ms/google losing money over having to justify the spendning on all that datacenters an chips, need people to depend and use it.
Frankly, I trust the Chinese models and tools over those from the US. I know for a fact that the Trump Regime wants to hurt and exploit everybody, just because it can.
Same! What’s the worst case scenario? The Chinese will learn I can’t actually write my own html?? Oh noe…
As a European its always very hypocritical when the US warns of Huawei Hardware when there were cases of tampered Cisco Hardware. I would not really trust the Chinese Router either way but when it comes to AI models…the local chinese bias model seems to be the better choice than the one that lives on a server over there in the USA. As long as I dont ask for historical data, social studies or the Tianman Square it should be good no? What could it do? Hide the communist manifest (do they still care about that anyway?) in some bash script?
make sure you don’t ask the american LLM about Palestine 😹
You can also use Heretic to decensor open-weight models, and there aren’t many of those being produced by American labs.
Personally, I would prefer the Swiss’s open Apertus models to become competitive, but they are at least a year and a half behind the Chinese at this point IMO. It will be a while before European offerings are good enough.
It’s self hosted tho?? I don’t get it. Isn’t remote-togglable stuff way more dangerous, like I don’t know, the Star Link?
You realize they want money to be spent, right?
This ain’t about saving money.
Wdym they have a online offering
I would assume the gov agencies self host their instances due to sensitive data. But even if they don’t, why not switch to self host?
Because idk, you need a good model and you dont have capex to buy a shitload of gpus
But yeah, ppl probably run small local models and they hate that too i can imagine. They want all the traffic to go to openai
Self hosting costs money in the form of computing hardware
nah they are using anthropoic, openai, MS, and google even.
Can’t stop me from running a local model. China has always been the boogeyman. Not that there aren’t valid criticisms against the Chinese government but I’m tired of this when we do it it’s good but when China does it it’s bad mindset. Bring back Huawei and Xiaomi phones.
Edit: Also these so-called capitalists want to ban the superior product instead of competing. It seems to me that China makes superior products. Why learn from them when you can ban the competition?
I’ve always liked the cheaper Chinese phones and products, and I honestly don’t understand what people are stressing about.
I, personally, am not a huge power or some threat or anything important to be honest.
My government might care about what I get up to but I really doubt my data is of much use to China at all.
Every government is watching and tracking. But I highly doubt some random girl in Europe is a priority for China.
Don’t run deep seek or you’ll be in deep shit.
Why is that?
Obviously because trust me bro.
I mean yeah, look what happened to Ukraine when the trusted a foreign country to provide satellite access.
So China can remotely disable Deepseek models whenever they want?
Hidden malicious behavior is the bigger risk, but if you did your job with sandboxing it (lol, lmao) that’s not a big risk
no. I’m in netsec, they aren’t shutting down your local model with secret code. deepseek is a lot safer then Claude, grok, and chatgpt because you don’t need Internet.
It’s open weights though
It’s just open weights. You never know what it was trained to do. That’s actually a hysterical take, because you can always check its work against other LLMs, or God forbid check it yourself, and as yet no such activity has been seen.
cuz everyone knows what that means
It means they release the model so you can run it yourself with enough hardware. Kind of like open source. Governments and large companies should be self-hosting this kind of stuff because of security, availability, and IP-leak risks anyway.
With LLMs, there is some risk of hidden malicious actions embedded in the weights that you can see until you ask it a magic question and it says “activate skynet.”
Whether or not the government is doing this because of fears of hidden actions in the weights or just because OpenAI/Anthropic CEOs told the government to give them more money is unclear.
I can run Bonsai, basically a distilled version of Qwen 3.5 (Qwen being the other major family of open weight Chinese developed LLMs) on my Steam Deck.
It ain’t fast, but its kind of nuts that it can run at all on hardware that is that underpowered, by typical LLM hardware standards.
You just run the thing in a sandbox of some kind, do not give it access to the outside internet or the rest of your computer, and the worst thing that is likely to happen is … you configure it slightly wrong, it uses too much RAM, and your system crashes. And your system can then reboot again, just fine, tone it down a bit to use less RAM.
For a large organization with networked security concerns and consistent uptime requirements, it is simply insane to just plug an LLM directly in to that, without architecting an entire system built around ‘assume the LLM will fuck up/go insane’; sanboxes within sandboxes with highly controlled connections to other sandboxes.
But that would be a significant feat of actual software engineering to construct that for/around an actually complex network, and would take time, so fuck that, we want line go up is what most companies decided to do instead, just fucking raw dog it.
But yeah the main ‘problem’ with LLMs in this sense is idiot CEOs just demanding the magic machine god be plugged right in to their very fragile, barely sensible networks and workflows, where the LLM is then going to break things in roughly the same way as would the nepo hire intern who was just directly promoted to sysadmin…
…not that an LLM has a secret activation phrase that will cause it to shut down or go berserk in a specific way.
Nobody runs it on their own hardware though (which costs tens of thousands of dollars). I’m willing to bet $100 that government institutions that were using it were just using cloud API (probably even Chinese one).
thanks for the explanation, I’m still not sure what “weights” are here, but I’m also not sure I want to know anything more about LLMs than I already unfortunately do, so I won’t ask you to explain it. :P
LLMs are basically large matrices of parameters called weights. It’s more complicated than that, but the weights are the parameters. Those embedded decimal numbers that get adjusted during training.
I see on openrouter there are like a couple dozens (if not more) of American companies where their business model is “spend some billions to build datacenters to host deepseek, surely someone will pay the bills”
