alt Hacker NewsAny country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China.
It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy.
Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not.
The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
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> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
People claim that AGI is. AI is turning out to be a fairly competitive but “normal” product. Companies carving out niches on cost, quality, and speed.
If it was a winner take all OpenAI’s head start would have been decisive. For years ChatGPT was far ahead of everyone, then Anthropic released Opus 3, then OpenAI released 4o, then in mid 2025 it seemed like everyone had strong reasoning models including Google with Gemini 2.5, and now Claude is probably the best coding model. So taking the top spot is not a guarantee you can hold it.
Also the top model becomes a prime target for distillation, making it easier for competitors to keep up.
I think you view this situation from the US point of view and assume that China has the same guiding principles and values in their foreign policy, for which it doesn't. They might do what you said, of course. But they very well might also treat LLMs as another goodwill investment like the Belt and Road Initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative) and export the capability to partner countries, for example, in Africa, to strengthen relationships.
> Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path.
Looking at most of the available evidence, Mythos is an incremental upgrade over other models and nowhere near the implied advancement that this seems to point to. I guess you could be right in that a sufficient advancement would cause this type of withholding of it, but I think it's kind of silly to think that the US has reached that level.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
AGI sure. But I don't think we're going to get there in our lifetimes, if ever. There are too many structural and physical limitations. One everyone seems to be catching onto now is that they're running out of human data and are incestuously feeing AI output to itself as input.
Current state AI is barely an improvement over where it was fifty years ago. We just have stronger hardware and more content to train on. We need a new paradigm. One that hasn't come in half a century.
I don’t think the ai market has been around long enough to prove winner take all, I see it more like a commodity which is why the winner quickly switched from OpenAI to Anthropic at least on coding.
I generally find the Chinese models to be superior. If you look at the token pricing or hosting cost it’s still about 80% margin on Chinese models. Deep cuts should still be possible.
This isn't how things typically work. For instance the US is increasingly adversarial towards China yet China continues to largely power the US economy both through manufacturing and market access, which makes up an increasingly large share of all revenue for many US companies. Why? Because that position as a dependency is not only directly economically beneficial to themselves, but also provides leverage which can be utilized in extreme circumstances.
This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models. I was expecting the US government to try to ban foreign models, which is also a self-own but orders of magnitude less than this. All this will do is greatly diminish the influence of the US in the future, and minimize the benefits they might reap from a global LLM explosion. It'd be like if 30 years ago, China decided that their manufacturing could only be used by white-listed individuals. Their economy and influence wouldn't be even a fraction of what it is today.