7/27/2026 at 11:04:47 PM
Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!)The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be widely released. Simply because that will affect Anthropic's bottom-line.
Anthropic and all other "model" companies have nothing making them special beyond privileged access to chips so obviously they want to restrict what models are out there and more importantly who can produce new ones. Without these restrictions, it's only a matter of time before the multi-hundred billions valuations simply evaporate while they are still holding the bag.
by vhantz
7/28/2026 at 3:46:33 AM
Also everything hes saying about China (and other actors) many outside the USA would say about the USA.The solution of a global arms race of state vs state with integrated statist corporations as the best outcome for end users sure is a choice though
by twelvechairs
7/28/2026 at 7:13:50 AM
He's also completely missed what many of us see as the primary the issue, HF was attacked by a US frontier model.HF could not be helped by US frontier models because of the "safety" features they have.
HF had to use an open model from china.
Anthropic wants to add those "safety" features to open models - especially from china.
End result would be HF hack would have continued atleast until the Monday that OpenAI engineers finally walked back into work.
by rustyhancock
7/28/2026 at 12:20:57 PM
I'm very confident that it was staged and coordinated. This propaganda started because they cannot evolve their models further. See Fable and Sol, they are lame. They seem incredible at first but the more you use you can see the trickery. It is a matter of time for someone to prove they are marginally better only because they inject more information to the harness at server side.by ppap3
7/28/2026 at 12:30:38 PM
I’m also into this conspiracy theory: ai created bug, ai hacked it, ai fixed it.by jimmydoe
7/28/2026 at 1:53:51 PM
just like ai will create amazing tests suits for the broken code it writes, if one isn't carefully watching...EDIT: of course it probably helps to have an up front tdd test suite, but often isn't the case.
by taude
7/28/2026 at 7:31:54 PM
Live overflow released the video today about it. It is very compelling but I guess there are holes on their hypothesis as well.The summary is that an instance was running on certain benchmarks without any limits or supervision and the AI decided to cheat by exploiting a silly series of vunlns.
by ppap3
7/28/2026 at 2:18:22 PM
The public narrative around conspiracy theories is baffling for sure: what rational basis is there for assuming them wrong? Often none.Incentive and ability are what should be looked at. There, things get far more interesting: what is the current state of AI employed by the US intelligence agencies and what do they use it for?
Having the public convinced, their "superiors" would only do everything in their best interest, even without anybody knowing for sure, is Huxley's Brave New World in real life.
by Loquebantur
7/28/2026 at 7:28:50 PM
Have you seen any of the emails Mr alt-tab-man sent regarding his enterprises? That guy is worse than fetid trashby ppap3
7/28/2026 at 3:39:39 PM
that's some real anti-truth you've got going on there. because we shouldn't assume that others are acting in our best interest, that any random assertion that there is collusion against us should be by default accepted as the truth.shouldn't any reasonable person when presented with a line of thought that has no substantiation at all conclude that they just can't reasonably be expected to support or reject the theory?
by convolvatron
7/28/2026 at 10:28:53 PM
? That's total nonsense.Positions of power attract people who want to use that power for their own gain. They abuse it regularly, whether it's politics, enterprises or even charity.
To assume, that somehow wouldn't happen when you don't look is beyond absurd. Of course it does.
So I pointed explicitly at US intelligence agencies, because there corruption is rampant and oversight virtually non-existent, respectively itself involved in the corruption.
What you suppose there is a grotesque "don't ask don't tell"-complicity.
In reality, trust has to be earned and that deservingness has to be verified.
by Loquebantur
7/28/2026 at 4:14:57 PM
Everything in this space is manufactured, the plebs is fed very deliberate information for manipulation. I don't think there is a debate about it. All the PR stuff is marketing.by hoppp
7/28/2026 at 1:16:40 PM
[dead]by dan_gee
7/28/2026 at 8:09:34 AM
I case you're wondering, HF = Hugging Faceby rob74
7/28/2026 at 5:37:49 PM
Every time I read Hugging Face, my brain first jumps to facehugger from Alien. I really wish they chose a different name...by littlecorner
7/29/2026 at 10:01:58 AM
Actually I wrote something similar yesterday as a reply to the (since flagged) comment below. Glad to see that more people have this association. But apparently the founders of Hugging Face didn't have it, or else they probably would have chosen some other "friendly" emoji for their startup (which initially developed a chatbot for teenagers - that makes the choice of name feel even creepier if you ask me).by rob74
7/28/2026 at 8:32:42 PM
Same here. The creature seems more fitting than the emoji too.by tessellated
7/28/2026 at 8:23:55 AM
[flagged]by markdown
7/28/2026 at 8:36:12 AM
It's the machine learning platform that started with "developing a chatbot app targeted at teenagers" (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face), which helps explain the weird name (which still makes me think more of one of the development stages of the xenomorphs from Alien than of the emoji, but that's probably just me).by rob74
7/28/2026 at 12:17:11 PM
It's definitely not just you :)by nyeah
7/28/2026 at 1:37:49 PM
I have it bookmarked as just the emoji because whenever I write the text I still think about the alien spider.by smallmancontrov
7/28/2026 at 9:59:13 AM
If you're not familiar with such overall big players, would anything help short of looking at some 101 first?by coldtea
7/28/2026 at 10:38:24 AM
I am familiar, yet used this comment to confirm my initial assumption.Abbreviations carry unnecessary cost on the side of the readers. There is always the chance that there is another shorthand for something else that is important and so there is a need to double check interpretations.
So thanks for the comment and no, a 101 wouldn't even help with this problem.
by soblemprolver
7/28/2026 at 10:51:03 AM
if you google "hf hack" the first result is OpenAI post-mortem official blog post so...by tough
7/28/2026 at 11:25:40 AM
Lol! Does it matter? Using an unclear acronym in the first reference to an object, besides adding energy waste (for the execution of unnecessary searches by users unfamiliar with the subject), may only give the author of the comment the thrill of "being well informed, an insider".by witrak
7/28/2026 at 3:03:56 PM
Curse of knowledge. / Unsafe assumption.Some users feel IP address, ISP, and LLM are clear. Fewer of those users will also reference HF. I have had to stop myself and type out Hugging Face.
HR perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
by Barbing
7/28/2026 at 12:35:56 PM
Wtf is a coca-cola?by bethekidyouwant
7/28/2026 at 11:23:01 AM
>Abbreviations carry unnecessary cost on the side of the readers.They do, but the parent's question wasn't about the abbrebation (for which I'd cut them some slack) but extended to:
"Is that supposed to help? WTF is a HuggingFace?".
>So thanks for the comment and no, a 101 wouldn't even help with this problem.
Wasn't addressed to you though (don't even see any other comment of you in this subthread), but to @markdown, whose issue wasn't with the abbreviation alone.
by coldtea
7/28/2026 at 8:31:28 AM
The biggest platform for the distribution of open-weight modelsby swiftcoder
7/28/2026 at 8:41:50 AM
For context:by gertrunde
7/28/2026 at 9:08:19 AM
Surely you can just google this.by tempfile
7/28/2026 at 3:43:49 PM
Worth checking, elsewhere in this thread someone points out glm only assessed the damage after the fact, it didn't stop the attack, and Hf apprently never sought access to a trusted defender program with a closed model either the open model saved them farming might not hold up.by imrozim
7/28/2026 at 8:52:33 PM
They wrote themselves that before the incident they were denied from the trust program...by mafuy
7/28/2026 at 8:20:21 AM
I think the fair nuance here is, an administration which used Executive Orders to force guardrails, meaning US companies must retain them, even if they might want to drop them now.And on top of that, with low/no guardrails, people call you a child pornographer(grok), so the public is also against it. Yet mysteriously few complain about Chinese open models being child pornographers.
So even if your goal isn't ethical, but just fiscal, it's reasonable to say there are two standards. And to complaint in some way.
I don't think banning is going to work, that's just silly. And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.
It's a genie that's not going back in the bottle, the bottle is smashed.
The only reasonable outcome would be section 230 style carveouts so that there is zero liability for anything a model does.
Because having guardrails on corporate models barely months ahead of open ones, which will never be restricted, is entirely pointless.
by b112
7/28/2026 at 12:29:29 PM
>child pornographer(grok)People call grok that because deviants were abusing grok's ability to edit images and post them publicly on X to strip people - including children - of their clothes, from their public photos. Then when there was backlash, Elon laughed it off. It took half the world opening investigations against X for violations of existing regulations for action to be taken.
The leniency that internet companies get in terms of dealing with illegal content comes with the expectation that they're making reasonable efforts to control the distribution of said content. X, and Grok, were actively supporting the production and distribution of the content in public.
It is very different from someone creating such images in a private account, and definitely very different from someone using a local model to do it.
by hgoel
7/28/2026 at 8:37:55 PM
My entire post was how it is unreasonable to have a dual standard, and my point was it's really irrelevant if it's a model you download and use locally, or if it's a model hosted remotely, or hosted and created remotely. You're not really providing any sensible reason where the line is, except "public company", which is, again, the entire point I'm making.The only realistic, non-double standard is that the creator of the model should be 100% responsible. What on earth does it have to do with who's hosting it?
And by this metric, aren't all the uncensored models on huggingface, child pornographers? And if so, why not? Provide tangible, real, sensible reasons please, and after all, isn't hugging face a company?
You know, people are all over the place on this. I see people complaining about guardrails, then in the next breath complaining there aren't enough. Complaining that open models are the thing, but then creating double standards.
So once again, what is your actual reason why it's different?
by b112
7/28/2026 at 10:12:59 PM
It isn't about "public company", the line is "posted to a public social media platform, with the owner indicating amusement".If someone uses something one of OpenAI's hosted models to generate illegal content, it isn't automatically spread to anyone that clicks on the post the original image is from. On top of that, OpenAI does not explicitly endorse the use of their models for such activities the way Musk did.
If someone uses a local model to generate illegal content, same thing applies.
I have a hard time believing that you're arguing in good faith. The differences are so blatantly obvious and they don't even require any discussion about guardrails. Grok was being used to edit images and post them on public social media. The technology to edit images has existed for decades now. So here's a direct analogy via Photoshop:
1. In the case of a local model: Someone using a local image editor to edit photos into illicit material and manually distributing them.
2. In the case of a hosted model: Someone using a cloud image editor to edit photos into illicit material and manually distributing them.
3. In the case of Grok: Someone using a cloud image editor to edit photos into illicit material, the cloud image editor automatically distributing it to the public, and the owner of the editor endorsing the material as an exemplar of what their editor is capable of.
In 1 and 2, the editor (ie the AI) was just a neutral tool. In 3 the issue is that the company explicitly endorsed and distributed the material, no longer neutral. This is why it's reputation is of being a CP machine.
by hgoel
7/28/2026 at 10:56:13 PM
The leniency that internet companies get in terms of dealing with illegal content comes with the expectation that they're making reasonable efforts to control the distribution of said content.Your words. Grok was an example, the owner is irrelevant in the discussion.
by b112
7/28/2026 at 11:40:27 PM
Really showing that you aren't engaging in good faith and your repeated incorrect interpretations of my words are out of a desire to cover for Musk.To spell it out for you further, the owner's actions matter. It doesn't matter that it was specifically Elon doing it. The owner promoting the ability to produce and post illicit content is the opposite of making reasonable efforts to control it!
by hgoel
7/29/2026 at 2:10:09 AM
[flagged]by b112
7/29/2026 at 3:57:47 AM
At this point I just have to assume that you're trolling. Idk how much more explicitly I have to say that it doesn't matter who the owner is, it matters what the owner did.by hgoel
7/29/2026 at 8:18:49 AM
And yet you incessantly go on about Musk, and talk about me as if I'm trying to protect him. You tried to claim that in the last post, right at the top, so yes, you're talking about Musk.And I've now been immensely clear, even though it should have been clear from my very first post, or at least the second, that in this discussion it's not even remotely relevant what the owner of any company did. Why would it matter? We're talking about local vs corporate compute for models here, and about who creates what baked-in restrictions in models. Not about what some random owner did.
This discussion is about open versus closed models. About them being legislated. About them being controlled. Why are you blathering on about Musk? Why do you keep going on about the actions of any CEO of any company, when I was discussing corporate vs individual liability in these matters? Even now, you seem to think it's relevant what the owner of companies do here. It's not. At all. Why on earth would it be?
I feel as if the largest discussion the world is having today is, "sweep it under the rug". You seem to be trying to say, and don't claim otherwise, as you went on and on about how corporate liability is different than with private models!, that what a person does on their personal computer should have different liability implications than on a corporate leased computer.
That if content creation cannot be seen, well then all is well and OK. Just sweep it under the rug, and all will be fine!
At one point you tried to shift this into the realm of "no it's only once it's posted", and that's moving closer to a correct target of personal liability and responsibility. But these issues are now so "in the faces" of the "normal joe", that the entire internet is about to change.
And the reason for that is, personal liability is coming to the internet.
All the age and identity verification blather is about, as I've been saying here and there for years, personal liability and responsibility. It is entirely ridiculous and irresponsible to place liability for user content at the feet of the makers of tools. Instead, if you post CSAM, or if you make a fake video to slander someone(eg, to screw with elections), or if you incite violence, all of it, one needs to be held personally liable and responsible for that.
That's where the internet is going. Anonymity will continue, of course, when you post to X, to Youtube, to Facebook, your identity will not be immediately disclosed. But they'll have it, as a requirement for posting anything, and a simple warrant will disclose it. Otherwise they'll face criminal liability.
I believe 230 carve outs will change to ensure that this degree of ID verification is a prerequisite for any form of liability exclusion. And really, seeing today's landscape? This is the most free method to continue on the path we're on.
It's the most free, as the concept of forcing companies to be the filter is horrible in comparison. If companies are the filter, guess what happens? They are politically bent, or they alternatively are legal liability concerned to the point that they over-filter. And if companies become "the filter", then that's where true freedom of expression disappears.
Yet if companies are not legally liable, then the weight of liability must lay somewhere. And it should lay on the end user's shoulder. That's how you retain the ability to express, to post political satire, it's where you get the ability to protest.
Imagine a world where the roads were all owned by private companies, and if you wanted to protest politically, you were not granted the right to use those roads?! Not even out of malice, but due to corporate liability fears.
That's what corporate liability looks like. And I can assure you, 100%, liability is here.
So your thoughts that companies should be treated "special" only means one thing.
It means the illusion of freedom, whilst your ability to exercise that freedom vanishes.
by b112
7/28/2026 at 8:48:34 AM
The "child pornography" thing was about image generation, which people for better or worse have very different moral standards for than for text generation. There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.Though I think your overall point still stands, and at least Grok's twitter bot has received a lot of criticism for pure text too (Mecha hitler comes to mind)
by wongarsu
7/28/2026 at 1:39:05 PM
It also must be seen in the context that the open weight models aren't commercially associated with a popular distribution site where people share the images, the people behind them aren't public figures seen as encouraging the use of the model for "undressing" (albeit in a funny way not related to minors), and they haven't yet responded to questions about what can be produced using their tool by proposing guardrails but only for non-paying users...Open weight models get scrutinised in a different way, also linked to perceptions of their developers' bias, like the tests to see whether they refuse to answer questions on certain historical events at Tiananmen Square
by notahacker
7/28/2026 at 3:37:23 PM
> There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.John Oliver disagrees with this
by HappMacDonald
7/28/2026 at 12:22:46 PM
> And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.You're vastly underestimating the scaling problem here.
Things that would need to be true for your statement to be valid:
- Model intelligence doesn't increase with model size
- Model intelligence doesn't increase with training set size
- Novel architecture completely decouples model intelligence scaling from hardware scaling
- Residential electricity is as cheap as industrial electricity
- RAM and GPU supply outpace demandby ethbr1
7/28/2026 at 3:16:59 PM
> child pornographer(grok)Further reading: XAI Bets on Grok's Racy Side, The Information, Jun 24, 2026
&: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/xai-cant-deny-gr...
lawyers cited a 2026 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) report confirming that 90 percent of xAI’s CyberTipline reports “were not actionable by law enforcement because xAI declined to include user information that would allow law enforcement to track and locate perpetrators.”by Barbing
7/28/2026 at 12:22:42 PM
Well... They are all part of a "high well regarded" group of people of a security committee that has no specialists or whatsoever, only trillionaires on a round tableby ppap3
7/28/2026 at 5:27:50 AM
All my adult life, China has given me cheap material goods. Whatever they do in their country is their own problem. They’ve never interfered in my politics or started any warsby spaceman_2020
7/28/2026 at 5:44:29 AM
> They’ve never interfered in my politics or started any warsBut they have. I dont know what specific country you are referring to but China has interfered with US elections as well as Canada, Taiwan, and Australia in addition to many many others.
They’ve annexed Tibet (1950), fought India (1962) and Vietnam (1979) among others and more recently in 2020 a deadly skirmish with India. They’ve generally shifted their focus to cyber military actions but you’d have to be pretty naive they won’t start to exercise military control over Taiwan when/if they get a chance.
by vlovich123
7/28/2026 at 6:02:44 AM
Now compare that to what the USA did in the same time frame. Pay special attention to people killed (either directly, or indirectly) outside of their own borders. Who should you be worried about?by don_esteban
7/28/2026 at 6:51:21 AM
Two evils just means there are two evils. We don't have to value one more than the other.Wrongs don't negate each other.
by minraws
7/28/2026 at 8:51:05 AM
If you have the choice between AI models created by one evil or the other, it does feel relevant which you consider to be the lesser evilby wongarsu
7/28/2026 at 11:49:11 AM
That’s a pathetic moral band-aid.All technology can be used for good or used for evil depending on who is using it and how. From fire to internal combustion engines to nuclear energy.
by repler
7/28/2026 at 8:01:54 AM
> We don't have to value one more than the other.Yes we do. We should evaluate threats and choose our allies carefully.
by bambax
7/28/2026 at 1:03:06 PM
[dead]by jmye
7/28/2026 at 7:23:30 AM
Correct, but people are not wrong in being more concerned about the evil biting than the one keeping it chill.by guax
7/28/2026 at 8:20:31 AM
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. As the saying goes: "better the devil you know". China can at least so far be relied upon to not shoot itself in the foot (and take the whole word with it). The same cannot be said of other great powers like the US (under Trump, for more reasons than I'm willing to list here) and Russia (with Putin's completely harebrained invasion of Ukraine). China can prove me wrong any time by invading Taiwan, but I still hope they don't. Of course, if we try to keep them away from advanced chip technology, that would be further motivation to invade (although TSMC is unlikely to survive an invasion - even if it did survive the actual conflict, it would probably be destroyed or evacuated to avoid it falling into Chinese hands? But I don't want to see the hardware prices after such an event).by rob74
7/28/2026 at 12:29:25 PM
> China can at least so far be relied upon to not shoot itself in the foot (and take the whole word with it)Here's the dangerous thing about that: modern CCP China is a newly ascendant world power.
Say what you want about the US today, but when was it at isn't interventionist worst historically-speaking?
Countries don't go to war because their leaders take them to war: they go to war because a sufficient chunk of internal interests support war.
And China has a rather politically-powerful military. Although Xi's recent housecleaning substantially weakened that power.
If China goes to war, it's probably going to be because their economy is in tatters.
by ethbr1
7/28/2026 at 1:04:55 PM
> If China goes to war, it's probably going to be because their economy is in tatters.Well, they probably also have to factor in whether invading Taiwan is likely to improve that situation, and I would argue that it's not - China is currently exporting stuff all over the world, so economic sanctions would be very painful for them. And there are lots of countries who would like to have a slice of the manufacturing that China is currently hogging...
by rob74
7/28/2026 at 4:20:43 PM
Very rarely do countries go to war because they think it will improve their economy.They go to war because a large chunk of their population is pissed off about the economy.
See also: US
by ethbr1
7/28/2026 at 9:58:29 PM
The US routinely goes to war to secure cheap oil, so I didn't think that's a good exampleby maest
7/28/2026 at 1:07:59 PM
Great powers go to war due to Thucydides Trap. When a hegemon feels their position is threatened by the success of a rising power, they usually try to crush it. https://www.belfercenter.org/programs/thucydidess-trap/thucy...by RobotToaster
7/28/2026 at 1:40:01 PM
I believe that China's deep answer to that problem is, "There are no just wars in the Spring and Autumn period. "There are some internal policy papers to that effect.
by aprentic
7/28/2026 at 2:08:15 PM
There is considerable evidence to suggest that the current US President goes to war if it will make him a quick buck.by monooso
7/28/2026 at 5:33:52 PM
China has planned out the invasion/reclamation of Taiwan in 2027. They held true to their Hong Kong timeline, not sure why this would be any different.by scottyah
7/28/2026 at 11:28:52 AM
And let's not forget the kidnapping of a foreign president, and nothing happened.by Foobar8568
7/28/2026 at 12:40:24 PM
Don’t let the manipulative narcissists lead you into the trap of false equivalenceby roysting
7/28/2026 at 11:26:31 AM
[flagged]by p2detar
7/28/2026 at 11:57:20 AM
We do well enough. It either happened naturally, or less likely due to a lab accident. If there is a cover up it is to hide incompetence.by jeltz
7/28/2026 at 12:11:28 PM
I have read the WHO [0] report and the conclusion is "possibly to likely" about the zoonotic origin of Covid, so no there isn't conclusive report how it came to be.> If there is a cover up it is to hide incompetence.
Which is my point to GP's "reliable" argument. China is not reliable and has its own interests at play just like the US or any other state for that matter, regardless of its international partnerships. It does want to project itself as "reliable" - that I can't deny.
0 - https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-...
by p2detar
7/28/2026 at 11:46:33 AM
Yes we do. We also (despite theories stating the contrary) know that the current climate change is caused by us burning too many fossil fuels, that the utility of vaccines preventing deadly diseases outweighs any rare side effects, that airlines are not involved in a secret conspiracy of releasing chemicals (all airlines at the same time and only in certain meteorological conditions), and that the earth is roughly spherical.by rob74
7/28/2026 at 12:39:32 PM
You should avoid agreeing with the narcissists that always use false equivalence, whataboutism, and goal post shifting the second you call them out.You are allowing them to define a ridiculous standard by agreeing with them that not only is it in fact “two evils” but what qualifies as evil. They’ll tell you…always only when called out, mind you…all and any meddling (also something they will then define with the same kind of falls equivalence loop) is evils, when that is simply not true, not is any kind of effort to influence the same thing as actual meddling, not us it always evil.
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point, the narcissistic personality or their little zombies in most cases will constantly shift and change things all to avoid you from being able to get a clear focus on the truth, something their explosively allergic to.
As an American child of the Empire with global perspective and very high access perspective, there is no other entity besides the cabal that controls the USA and acts flying its banner; that is more deadly, more meddling, more conniving, more evil, more supremacist, and more vile.
by roysting
7/28/2026 at 7:32:57 AM
Given it's an internet forum, and people here can be anyone around the world, I understand your intent but people over index on the threat that ofc feels closer, rather than the threat that's significantly farther away.But in general if you ask folks in south east Asia you will find they are likely to be more concerned with China than US except this maddening Oil Crisis.
Although I think people now are very afraid/wary of both evils.
The US govt should think why people in all parts of the world including US itself feel just if not more threatened by them, than China and other evils we have floating around.
I would like to hope my American friends didn't vote for this madness or maybe they did I have read DHH's tweets.
by minraws
7/28/2026 at 7:31:01 AM
Sadly, we live in a decidedly imperfect world. I don't think there is a single completely good person on the planet, let alone a country.by khriss
7/28/2026 at 9:20:31 AM
Nobody said they negate each other. The comment being discussed is fearmongering about China and is very relaxed about the USA. All we're saying is you should be either afraid of both or relaxed about both. China is not worse than the US.by tempfile
7/28/2026 at 1:20:40 PM
[dead]by jmye
7/28/2026 at 7:25:47 AM
It is perfectly fine to say that a person who killed one person is bad but not as bad as the one who killed thousands.I eagerly await for the USA citizens to downvote this in about 5 hours.
by LtWorf
7/28/2026 at 6:39:38 AM
> Who should you be worried about?For Americans the answer is obvious since they are biased in this.
For everybody else, your question is valid.
by teiferer
7/28/2026 at 6:54:11 AM
Dont pretend americans dont need to be afraid of american government. look at the state of the place. A lot of them arent exactly thrilled with their current environment, job market, education, prisonsystem, gun laws, food industry, healthcare etc. etc.the question is valid for anyone who cares for more than their own ass
by saidnooneever
7/28/2026 at 8:05:21 AM
I'm an American, but I do not think the American government being strong helps me or my fellow Americans. The less America can project its cultural and military power on the rest of the world, the better.by panicinducer
7/28/2026 at 8:47:30 AM
There are different kinds of strengths. There was a past American government that was strong enough to stamp out inequality and fight for civil rights. To overturn oppression and give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed. That's a strong American government I could get behind.by fragmede
7/28/2026 at 12:21:54 PM
Economic inequality is higher than it's ever been in the US. The reforms you're talking about largely happened in the single term of LBJ, I don't think it can be extrapolated to the "US government"by nylonstrung
7/28/2026 at 4:03:52 PM
> There was a past American government that was strong enough to stamp out inequality and fight for civil rights.this is a hilariously naive rewriting of history, the government was very reluctant to make those changes. It's thanks to popular movements that those changes were made.
by dudefeliciano
7/29/2026 at 1:42:31 AM
I'm thinking specifically of the Little Rock Nine in 1957 where President Eisenhower took charge of the national guard so that nine Black students could attend high school. The government isn't one monolithic entity. It's a bunch of people doing different stuff, and some of them suck, and some of them are awesome.by fragmede
7/29/2026 at 6:42:53 AM
> The government isn't one monolithic entityOk but when you said "There was a past American government that was strong enough to stamp out inequality" you did not make that distinction. The US government in 50s and 60s was not responsible for giving you civil rights, it was popular movements.
by dudefeliciano
7/28/2026 at 11:38:28 AM
That is quite a take, but I guess it's the perspective that the American education system indoctrinates.by panicinducer
7/28/2026 at 7:11:13 AM
Considering who has been their president for 2 terms, and most likely a third one, I really wonder.All my life I heard American boasting their constitutions but now it's as worthy of my toilet papers.
by Foobar8568
7/28/2026 at 9:31:28 AM
Turns out the whole system is quite fragile when faced with people who have no interest in anyone besides themselvesby neal_jones
7/28/2026 at 6:52:44 AM
The American government has caused the death of a lot more Americans than China has.by Gud
7/28/2026 at 9:03:26 AM
Cultural revolution?by clarionbell
7/28/2026 at 9:06:20 AM
How many Americans were killed during the Cultural revolution?by Gud
7/28/2026 at 10:17:26 AM
[flagged]by cebert
7/28/2026 at 2:24:52 PM
After all of these years, no link between China and CoV2 virus was found[1][2]. Evidence points out that virus was originated few months earlier (September-October 2019) and outside of China. Wuhan was first city where CoV2 meet Swine Flu, which raised both infection rate and death rate (from 1.1% for CoV2 and 0.1% for Swine Flu to 5.4%).Evidence points to Russia, where major incident happen at Sep 16, 2019[3] "Vector" BSL4 lab in Koltsovo (Novosibirsk), where unprotected first responders entered BSL4 lab and stole lab equipment. Then virus transferred to Wuhan by Chinese military police after joint training with Russian military in Koltsovo few weeks later after the incident.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03982-2
[2]: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00353-8
[3]: https://thebulletin.org/2019/09/an-explosion-rocked-a-russia...
by oneshtein
7/28/2026 at 10:59:47 AM
Ironically funded by US taxes, if you believe this hypothesis to be true.by Gud
7/28/2026 at 12:13:27 PM
What does that have to do with anything? If I pay the salary of a driver and they decide to drink and run over a family it's in no way my fault.by austinthetaco
7/28/2026 at 12:47:32 PM
If you pay a researcher to do gain of function research on dangerous viruses, and that research end up causing a global pandemic, you are absolutely to blame.by Gud
7/28/2026 at 1:41:11 PM
that is not correct in the slightest. It would only be your blame if you built and managed the lab. The lab is not US owned or managed, it's up to the lab who claims they can safely work on dangerous viruses to ensure that they keep it contained. They still own and manage and are responsible for the lab, the US just paid them for research. It's no different than the US contracting space onboard SpaceX rockets, the US isn't then suddenly responsible if the rocket misdirects and hits someone's house.by austinthetaco
7/28/2026 at 3:31:00 PM
The client is absolutely responsible. If they fund the lab, they are absolutely responsible for how the lab is conducting it's research.I can't believe I have to type this out.
by Gud
7/28/2026 at 3:40:02 PM
This has gotta be a troll man. They aren't responsible for poor security measures. They are only responsible for what is outlined in the thing they pay for. I'm gonna mute this thread purely because I'm pretty certain you're trolling for the sake of it. If for some reason you aren't trolling, take a business ethics and responsibilities course, there's some free ones online, or you could talk to a lawyer you might know, either one should help you understand.by austinthetaco
7/28/2026 at 4:09:40 PM
XD business ethics and lawyers, sure mate.Have a nice day.
by Gud
7/28/2026 at 7:06:45 AM
[flagged]by neuroticnews25
7/28/2026 at 7:17:24 AM
Please reconsider this comment. Calling one side superior and the other side insects really doesn't help with the discussion, and dehumanizing a whole swath of people really has dark consequences.by nlehuen
7/28/2026 at 8:22:36 AM
Yeah, sorry for being edgy. But remember the understanding of universal human dignity your comment is stemming from is not shared globally.by neuroticnews25
7/28/2026 at 8:52:28 AM
At least not shared by you, apparently.by mldqj
7/28/2026 at 9:03:36 AM
That's why I'm inferior!by neuroticnews25
7/28/2026 at 7:59:21 AM
Speak for yourself, in Italy we are also closer to US "culture", but I do see the US as a bigger threat than China, simply because it's closer and it directly affects our politics.by Doch88
7/28/2026 at 10:32:51 AM
This sounds like you are urging people not to disregard racism when comparing superpower regimes.by nswango
7/28/2026 at 6:13:05 AM
For a concrete example, consider e.g. Operation Condor which displaced my own family> Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor; Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a campaign of political repression by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America, involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wing sympathizers in South America. Operation Condor formally existed from 1975 to 1983. Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to the Army War Academy in Santiago, Chile. The operation was backed by the United States, which financed the covert operations. France is alleged to have collaborated but has denied involvement. The operation ended with the fall of the Argentine junta in 1983.
by vector_spaces
7/28/2026 at 6:47:17 AM
Both of them.by isoprophlex
7/28/2026 at 6:30:49 AM
Whataboutism isn’t a useful game. The claim was that they don’t interfere with politics of external countries. They do.The claim is they don’t engage in warfare when they do, just exclusively in the digital domain for now. Believing it’ll stay there is naive.
Playing the moral superiority game is uninteresting in either direction. Games of power inherently are devoid of morality.
by vlovich123
7/28/2026 at 6:49:25 AM
Ok, let's follow your rules then. If we remove morality, we are left with what? Pure numbers? If you want to be technically correct China foreign interventions are > 0, indeed. But the scale of US actions is, I would dare to say, at least one magnitude bigger. An empire should be judged for how they treat their own citizens, their allies and their enemies. And if we do that, maybe China and the US are not so different.by darkwater
7/28/2026 at 7:01:37 AM
I’m confused. You start off like you’re going to disagree and then end with the same conclusion I was trying to suggest. Keep in mind I was replying to subvenir who said “eh China not bad - they’ve file nothing wrong to me”by vlovich123
7/28/2026 at 7:43:52 AM
I read your previous message as implying "US is good", rather than "China is bad too". I'm glad I misunderstood you and that we agree then.by darkwater
7/28/2026 at 7:17:54 AM
I'd like you to familiarise yourself with a legal and societal principle we use in civil law countries:> de minimis non curat praetor
Which basically means judges are not interested in minor disputes. When you add the USA to the mix, China's actions pale in comparison to the point of being negligible, no point in discussing them given the scale of USA's warmongering, overseas and local crimes. "They never interfered in [...]" is an exaggeration which shows the lack of importance of China's crimes when compared to the USA's, that's all.
The "whataboutism" here isn't a deflection strategy, it shows the hypocrisy and correctly minimises the scale of China's actions in comparison to the hypocrites'.
by randunel
7/28/2026 at 6:53:31 AM
Whataboutism is a very useful game to reveal whether people are being honest or not.If someone is vocally complaining about country A doing some oppressive activity, while ignoring country B doing 100x the same activity, the comparison does not forgive or excuse country A, or make them right or admirable.
But it does allow us to conclude that the person complaining is biased. Either they don't care about the oppressive activity and want to attack country A for some other reason. Or they have a particular fondness for country B and will never accept that it does wrong. Or some variation on these.
by nswango
7/28/2026 at 7:03:12 AM
Except it’s op posting whataboutism not me - their claim is that China has done nothing wrong to them with the implication that the USA has. I was highlighting that China indeed likely has done the things they’re complaining about.by vlovich123
7/28/2026 at 7:52:08 AM
>The claim is they don’t engage in warfare when they do, just exclusively in the digital domain for now.Come on, are you seriously equating hacking to literally bombing and killing people? That's just arguing in very bad faith.
Calling hacking "warfare" is just intellectually dishonest, if not downright disgusting toward the actual victims of American wars.
by Cookingboy
7/28/2026 at 1:05:00 PM
how is this not a non sequitur in your head. genuine question.by dominotw
7/28/2026 at 12:01:57 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutismby stogot
7/28/2026 at 8:28:53 AM
Whataboutism is juvenile.by cmpxchg8b
7/28/2026 at 9:23:28 AM
This is not whataboutism.by tempfile
7/28/2026 at 8:06:51 AM
“China is evil.”—- “But look at the United States! What about that?”
Is this not just whataboutism? It never adds much to the discussion.
by jb1991
7/28/2026 at 8:26:47 AM
It would be whataboutism if it was a random Joe saying "China is evil" not literally a company that 1) is in the US 2) has a strong influence in the government and legislations affecting them and their competition.In this case it's just pointing out the propaganda and the contradiction.
by Doch88
7/28/2026 at 6:30:17 AM
The Indian wars were border skirmishes at most. Literally 2,000 soldiers dead on both sides combined by official count. Very few civilian casualties.The 2020 skirmish was way smaller with single digit casualties. Again, almost no civilian casualties because it's a largely empty region in the first place
You really can't compare this to the kind of wars America has started. Casualties - both civilian and military - stood in the hundreds of thousands
by spaceman_2020
7/28/2026 at 7:26:42 AM
And then we haven't included Bibi-enabling, allowing a genocide to take place and then suggesting it is a real estate opportunity.by microtonal
7/28/2026 at 9:15:44 AM
I mean most of Chinese "wars" have been border issues. Most of these border issues themselves stem from badly drawn borders post colonial withdrawal. These are understandable, if not justifiable - countries tug at each other to figure out where their territories start/end. A hostile neighbor at your borders is a legitimate national threatAmerica's wars have been in countries so far away that they could've never posed any threat whatsoever to America as a nation.
Really not the same thing
by spaceman_2020
7/28/2026 at 4:55:54 PM
> America's wars have been in countries so far away that they could've never posed any threat whatsoever to America as a nationThat’s fallacious reasoning that ignores how easy travel is and how cheap an attack can cause massive damage. 9/11 was massive attack from countries far away. We regularly see commercial drones being used in warfare causing huge damage and casualties. There was the 2012 terrorist attack on our CIA facilities in Benghazi.
Terrorism entrenched abroad impacts our security. Is the response we take incorrect and makes it worse / are there things we do to provoke this? Some things yes, other things are like having Israel as an ally which is a culturally, socially and economically aligned power in the region even though it’s hated in the region.
Also don’t forget the US is a major maritime power. China is trying to be, Russia is not. Maritime powers force project more broadly because a) is the nature of being a maritime power b) you have to protect shipping to make sure trade routes are uninmpeded. B is particularly important as it also helps explain the wars (eg the Iran war is about the strait and trade and who collects money, not really about nuclear capabilities).
by vlovich123
7/28/2026 at 6:11:19 AM
If you're making a case of this vs what the US has interfered with, it simply does not stack up. Of course it's naive to think they won't start interfering like the US once they gain the leverage, but to a neutral party it likely doesn't matter which of these two ends up as the superpower on the global stage.by potamic
7/28/2026 at 10:23:24 AM
One, as bad as it is, has its biggest critics live and speak out freely. The other silences, imprisons or kills them.by pell
7/28/2026 at 12:02:22 PM
With the butchering of the Correspondent's Dinner last week, it doesn't seem like things will be the way they were.by potamic
7/28/2026 at 12:05:16 PM
Something which Trump wants to change. Trump has already done a lot of silence critical media and he wants to do more.by jeltz
7/28/2026 at 9:40:26 AM
Tibet was part of China since the Quing dynasty in the 17th century, it briefly declared independence during the chaos of the Chinese civil wars, but it was never recognised.Vietnam is usually recognised as a low point in Chinese history.
There's been an ongoing border dispute between China and India for over 100 years, thanks to some questionable line drawing by the British.
Also, referring to the parent comment, of these only the border skirmish with India was within my lifetime.
by RobotToaster
7/28/2026 at 8:22:43 AM
in contrast this is USA's main job is to Interfere in any country it can in favor of its own goals. not related to what the people of that state really want.north Americans must stay silent about interfering in other states internal issues.
by yekanchi
7/28/2026 at 2:10:52 PM
What people don't know is that China's "war" against Vietnam in 1979 was actually a pledge of allegiance to the United States, a way of demonstrating its stance.This event was followed by the longest honeymoon period in Sino-US relations, which eventually lead to China's rise.
by rikima_
7/28/2026 at 6:08:14 AM
They have colonies and generally aspire to become basically the old british empire as a longterm strategy? At least thats what they push with that "century of humiliation" comeback strategy internally..by 21asdffdsa12
7/28/2026 at 9:52:23 AM
Did anything else happen in Vietnam in the 70s?by rithdmc
7/28/2026 at 9:55:53 AM
That is nothing compared to the usby ksk23
7/28/2026 at 5:53:04 AM
No new wars in 47 years is a pretty good run vs other major powers.by cpursley
7/28/2026 at 6:09:01 AM
Lets ask xinjang?by 21asdffdsa12
7/28/2026 at 7:12:40 AM
Let's ask black people, minorities and foreigns with the wrong skin color in the US?What about women too ? Especially in red states.
by Foobar8568
7/28/2026 at 6:31:36 AM
Repression of their own citizens is another subject. It is of course highly problematic and should be condemned as much as possible, but in the same way that if the US decided to repress mormons violently, it remains internal affairs and not an imperialistic threat to the countries around them.by well_ackshually
7/28/2026 at 7:01:50 AM
> it remains internal affairs and not an imperialistic threatThat's pre 1945 style thinking, which is coming back with a vengeance.
by dudefeliciano
7/28/2026 at 1:55:34 PM
I imagine they are better off and more developed than any of the Muslim regions the US has bombed the ever living crap of continuously over the past 50 years...by cpursley
7/28/2026 at 2:21:19 PM
So I don't support the re-education camps that happened in Xinjiang. Exactly what happened here is still a bit of an unknown because unfortunately there's a ton of misinformation. Whatever did happen, you can go see yourself. It's not a closed region. There are a ton of Youtube videos of people going.But I hate this talking point for one primary reason: almost nobody who brings it up actually cares about the Uyghurs. It's just a talkijng point.
How do I know this? Because of Palestine. If Benjamin Netanyahu turned around tomorrow and treated Palestinians as Uyghurs were and are treated and developed the region like China does today then he would win the Nobel Peace Prize and Palestinians would be unquestionably better off. It wouldn't be sufficient mind you.
Israel's crimes in Palestine are America's crimes because Israel could not exist without the economic and military support of the US, political cover in the UN and international community and the political will of Us domestically. It would collapse tomorrow if the US withdraw support.
So I don't want to hear a thing from China hawks and skeptics about Xinjiang unless they're louder what Israel is doing to the region.
by jmyeet
7/28/2026 at 4:18:58 PM
> But I hate this talking point for one primary reason: almost nobody who brings it up actually cares about the Uyghurs. It's just a talkijng point.Exactly, it's just people parroting psyop narrative talking points, Taiwan is another. Repeat something enough and people will eventually believe it.
There's a reason other nations are choosing China over the US/EU (including Muslim and Turkish ones) - there's no moralizing, political requirements, nor bombs.
by cpursley
7/28/2026 at 10:21:51 AM
Its called a cold war.by greenchair
7/28/2026 at 6:38:15 AM
> China has interfered with US electionsWow, that newest of Trump's distraction talking points made it surprisingly quickly to the uncontended (?) and commonly accepted facts in HN conversations.
by teiferer
7/28/2026 at 7:09:22 AM
You’re misinformed. The Biden administration in 2020 declassified that Beijing has prepared to latch influence campaigns in 2020 but backed off. December 2023 a report was released that they had changed track and engaged in influence operations during the 2022 midterms. Biden’s administration also warned about influence operations in the 2024 election cycle. The Biden DOJ unsealed multiple indictments against Chinese intelligence officers, state-backed hackers (such as APT41), and illegal Ministry of State Security agents acting inside the U.S.You’re very misinformed if you think Trump’s latest blathering are completely wrong. I generally don’t pay attention to him so I don’t know exactly how he lied or exaggerated but I’m sure he did. It doesn’t negate the real and active influence operations China is engaged in
by vlovich123
7/28/2026 at 8:35:38 AM
You’re very misinformed if you think democrats and republicans arent playing the “election influence fiddle” in exactly the same way; legitimising the elections they won, casting doubt on those they lost, all while achieving the main goal of making sure the population doesnt forget who their so called enemies are.by div
7/28/2026 at 4:17:19 PM
[dead]by redsocksfan45
7/28/2026 at 9:07:00 AM
Lots of assumptions about what I think. I pointed out that Trump put the topic on the agenda a few days ago and now it comes up in HN comments. No more, no less. Whether it has merit is a different question. Point is that the reach of him setting topics goes far which is hard to deny.by teiferer
7/28/2026 at 9:54:08 AM
I'm surprised to see that this hasn't received enough downvotes to be grayed out. It seems those who can downvote on HN mostly believe this BSby novoreorx
7/28/2026 at 9:24:42 AM
> China has interfered with US electionsWow. I bet we'll soon be reading on HN that Biden stole the elections back in 2020.
by severino
7/28/2026 at 7:06:15 PM
No one who believed it definitely was has changed their mind, they've just at most gotten quiet about it.No one who believed it definitely was not has changed their mind, they've just at most gotten quiet about it.
No one who believed it could have been but that the claim has not been proven have changed our minds, we've just decided that there's no way to know what actually happened.
by Ancapistani
7/28/2026 at 2:01:11 PM
"But Tibet!!!" has to be the most intellectually lazy pro-American imperialism argument, particularly when you consider the US history of regime change [1]. Heck, this unwinnable war we're fighting in Iran has a direct through line to not one but two such incidents, specifically the coup in 1953 and US involvement in the Islamic Revolution in 1979 (ie making sure the fundamentalists won instead of the communists). And weirdly a significant number of these puppets end up turning into enemies and far worse problems (eg Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden).Tibet specifically is funny because one of the things China did was end slavery in Tibet [2]. A large percentage of the population were "serfs" but that was a generous translation because these "serfs" could be traded. You know, like property. Like slaves.
And Vietnam? They had a small border dispute. What did the US do to Vietnam? And Cambodia? And Laos?
But the funniest claim of all here is election interference. The foreign interference in US elections conversation begins and ends with Israel with an honorable mention to Russia for running some Facebook ads. Just last night we had a debate in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, a race that AIPAC proxies (eg UDP) have spent upwards of $60 million. On a primary.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_serfdom_controversy
by jmyeet
7/28/2026 at 3:34:16 PM
Did the US annex Vietnam or Iran?There's a qualitative difference between interference and outright annexation, with borders redrawn and cultures violently assimilated.
by dgroshev
7/28/2026 at 4:12:55 PM
[dead]by stiltzkin
7/28/2026 at 6:48:36 AM
[flagged]by gadders
7/28/2026 at 8:30:53 AM
Same as killing Palestinian and Yemeni kids if some westerner need a transplant, I guess ?by Parae
7/28/2026 at 9:09:29 AM
You think the USA does that?by gadders
7/28/2026 at 11:09:31 AM
You think the USA doesn't support nations that do?by aa-jv
7/28/2026 at 11:18:13 AM
The USA may support the country in general. I don't think they support this specific policy.by gadders
7/28/2026 at 12:09:43 PM
Sure they do, or else it wouldn't be happening.by aa-jv
7/28/2026 at 7:27:00 AM
At this point with how volatile US is I'd rather have China control Taiwan than US.And this comment isn't about putting any good light on China. Lately US acts like they want to compensate for Russia fucking up less things around the world
by PunchyHamster
7/28/2026 at 6:41:25 AM
> Whatever they do in their country is their own problem.Idk to me it feels like human compassion and ethics dictates that you at least have to care a bit even about the things in other countries. Otherwise all sorts of horrible domestic policies would be justifiable.
by KronisLV
7/28/2026 at 8:01:53 AM
Star Fleet first directive has been proven right many times.by miroljub
7/28/2026 at 8:03:20 AM
That's a very selfish way to think of it. Whatever they do in their country does not stay in their country because China is becoming a superpower so you should expect it (as it's normal) to interfere and affect policy abroad.For example Lithuania has been punished for letting Taiwan opening an embassy (in Lithuania). So China cares what other countries do in their country. Without EU support Lithuania could have faced very harsh consequences. That's just an example. Another example is the "secret police" stations undeclared overseas police stations operated by China in various countries (i.e. U.S for example). China gave you cheap material goods because that was its business but you have to keep in mind it's an authoritarian, communist regime. It carries an extra risk on top of the potential economic coercion if you give it too power. At least you know that U.S is only after the money and does not want to turn your country in a communist "utopia".
That being said this does not mean we should ban Chinese AI models because China didn't cross any red lines(yet) compared with Russia for example.
by theplumber
7/28/2026 at 9:29:28 AM
"U.S is only after the money and does not want to turn your country in a communist "utopia""Not mutually exclusive, just take a look at Venezuela.
by dooom
7/28/2026 at 9:34:02 AM
That looks like to support my point. The US is just for the money. It’s not like they brought them communism or whatever Venezuela has there. They simply said they don’t care about “spreading” democracy anymore as long as the regime plays ball. I think they did that anyway in the past but at least it was not the “official” policy.by theplumber
7/28/2026 at 7:39:36 AM
For you personally no, but there's plenty of scandals of politicians being influenced by the Chinese, case in point in my own country: https://www.ft.com/content/601df41f-8393-46ad-9f74-fe64f8ea1...Don't be naive or I might even think you're working for the Chinese :-)
by PatronBernard
7/28/2026 at 4:48:08 PM
I wish I could be this blissfully naive.China is becoming an intellectual powerhouse in addition to a manufacturing powerhouse and runs huge spyware and propaganda campaigns.
Read up about T95, MBOX, TVBOX, or other Android TV Boxes advertised as generic TV streaming devices advertised as "unlocked" or capable of accessing free content. They're loaded with spyware/malware, typically BADBOX. Some of them will record audio and record your network traffic and send it to China.
I'm also convinced that the anti-education thread winding its way through US culture is being amplified by China. They likely didn't start it, as it's been growing for decades, but China will happily keep it going.
by Sohcahtoa82
7/28/2026 at 6:36:36 AM
But they're happily selling drone parts to Russians dropping bombs on civilians (or "whatever").by blackhaz
7/28/2026 at 9:06:01 AM
In fact, they are also selling drones to Ukraine.by jari_mustonen
7/28/2026 at 6:42:14 AM
Yes and the USA trained and gave weapons to the Taliban and many other terror organizations. "China sold none weapons to another country" really pales in comparison.by xquce
7/28/2026 at 7:38:44 AM
This is wrong. The US did not give weapons to the Taliban (voluntarily). If you mean Operation Cyclone their receiver was not the Taliban but the mujahadeen, which, yes, consisted of Taliban, but also of enemies of the taliban (northern alliance)by preisschild
7/28/2026 at 12:11:29 PM
The Northern Alliance contain some people who are probably even worse than the Taliban so while you are technically right I am not sure it matters.by jeltz
7/28/2026 at 8:13:20 AM
[flagged]by forafistfulof
7/28/2026 at 1:39:58 PM
What are you expecting when you're physically in another country attempting to annex it?The only reason I suspect Iranian proxies are not doing the same in the US is right now the US is just Trump in Iran with 2/3rds of the country not supporting him. The day a bunch of civilians bite it partying in Miami, that calculation changes.
The US is "guilty" of materially supporting Ukraine in a bid to defend itself. The US isn't mad at Russia or China for doing the same for Iran as this is all... fairly normal in geo politics.
by boondongle
7/28/2026 at 12:10:02 PM
Russian bot detected?by witrak
7/28/2026 at 2:07:32 PM
What country do you live in? Nevermind it doesn’t matter because literally every country has had their politics interfered with.by sailfast
7/28/2026 at 6:28:10 AM
Oh i bet they have not directly interfered with your politics, but they do interfer a lots in various things. More than any other country on this planet? I don't know. China is big. Really really big.by b3lvedere
7/28/2026 at 4:59:44 PM
I personally think it’s bad when countries commit genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...by john-h-k
7/28/2026 at 7:20:39 PM
Lol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_warrior_diplomacyby Paradigma11
7/28/2026 at 6:27:21 AM
Do you remember covid and where it come from?by t0bia_s
7/28/2026 at 6:32:26 AM
A disease can come from anywhereUnless you're trying to imply that China engineered the whole thing - extraordinary claim that will require extraordinary evidence
by spaceman_2020
7/28/2026 at 10:22:10 AM
Imagine you have most expensive disease in human history by economy standpoint and after 6 years we have just claims of where it came from. Isn't that suspicious enough?by t0bia_s
7/28/2026 at 11:34:18 AM
Where did Spanish Flu "come from"? Or HIV for that matter.We've got a fair idea where SARS-CoV-2 originated (horseshoe bats). It's the early path it took that's muddy.
by flir
7/29/2026 at 8:45:33 AM
There was no worldwide lockdowns because of HIV or Spanish Flu.by t0bia_s
7/28/2026 at 11:52:33 AM
Turn off Fox newsby sirsinsalot
7/29/2026 at 8:42:44 AM
/US centristNever turned on and probably never will.
by t0bia_s
7/28/2026 at 7:04:57 AM
They did downplay the effects of covid and spread misinformation about it as well as silence the researches and journalists who were first trying to ring the alarm bellsby dudefeliciano
7/28/2026 at 3:31:33 PM
My country did the same thing to me. :-/by oneshtein
7/29/2026 at 4:09:28 PM
My very western country as well.by dormento
7/28/2026 at 11:07:14 AM
Are you talking about Trump and conservatives here?by watwut
7/28/2026 at 12:58:34 PM
Nope[1]. I am getting tired of people looking up to China just because the governments of Europe and US are completely fucked. China is no better.[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...
by dudefeliciano
7/28/2026 at 6:42:48 AM
Tulsi said US operates lot of biolabs outside US so as to avoid US regulations.by worldthruword
7/28/2026 at 3:30:33 PM
Yes, I remember: "Vector" BSL4 Lab, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation, Sep 16 2019. Fire blast, then unequipped military first responders which stole lab equipment, then joint military training with Wuhan military police few weeks later.China was the first victim of the Russian virus.
by oneshtein
7/28/2026 at 5:49:35 AM
I mean them selling the cheap material goods is politics, and they use that a lot to threaten other countries. They constantly bully neighbors and assert claims on foreign terriroty. They might not be the comic book villians people are making them out to be but your take is just ignorantby altmanaltman
7/28/2026 at 6:33:04 AM
Such horrible villains, threatening the world with cheap stuff!by spaceman_2020
7/28/2026 at 6:50:39 AM
Nice straw man. The point is not "cheap stuff" but using economic leverage and territorial pressure on others because of the "cheap stuff." And yes, all China does is produce cheap stuff for the world, nothing else at all lol.by altmanaltman
7/28/2026 at 7:43:33 AM
They have their own genocide in western chinaby cechmaster
7/28/2026 at 7:56:26 AM
According to the U.S. State Department, they literally do not:https://law.stanford.edu/press/state-department-lawyers-conc...
That whole thing was a very successful propaganda campaign, making people believing China has been mass murdering Uyghurs.
by Cookingboy
7/28/2026 at 2:47:42 PM
The article says otherwise. It opens with it isn’t genocide but is crimes against humanity.The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide, placing the United States’ top diplomatic lawyers at odds with both the Trump and Biden administrations, according to three former and current U.S. officials.
by oceansweep
7/28/2026 at 7:35:22 AM
> They’ve never interfered in my politics or started any warsThey actively back russia and deliver them weapons and support them with their attempted Genocide in Ukraine. They also actively threaten Taiwan.
Not to mention them claiming almost the entire South China Sea even though this being against international law and threatening smaller nations into submitting to them
by preisschild
7/28/2026 at 8:28:14 AM
We don’t have to guess. Here is a recent survey:People in Many Countries Now View China More Positively Than the U.S.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/07/15/people-in-many...
by ozgung
7/28/2026 at 8:50:04 AM
Are you saying the USA is somehow as repressive as china?by pipes
7/28/2026 at 9:01:17 PM
Probably more.by LtWorf
7/28/2026 at 1:01:54 PM
As someone who has never visited China or the US; yes. Why? Media. School shootings, ICE, crazy president… What do I see from China? Impressive multi-million cities… and true to be told, not much.China had a worse reputation, but not anymore since Trump leads the US.
Im not saying that the above is objective, tho
by sdevonoes
7/28/2026 at 5:47:27 PM
School shootings aren't carried out by the government. Crazy president democratically elected and criticised by a free press. Things that you don't like about a country are a lot different than things that will get you and your family disappeared by your government.by pipes
7/28/2026 at 9:02:35 PM
They are carried out because of your unwillingness to stop giving weapons to moody teenagers.by LtWorf
7/28/2026 at 12:36:09 PM
Yes, only if measured by their own people.Trump deports, half of the USA people screamed; Xin builds reeducation camps, most Chinese people are cool.
by jimmydoe
7/28/2026 at 11:10:05 AM
More repressive, by real statistics.by aa-jv
7/28/2026 at 1:11:00 PM
> Also everything hes saying about China (and other actors) many outside the USA would say about the USA.yes he is writing it as usa citizen running it a us company.
I dont see how "usa is also.." is relevant here.
by dominotw
7/28/2026 at 9:50:54 AM
His Concern 1 was especially painful to read. It reminds me of Red Fever rhetorics from McCarthy era. He casually mentions CCP and People’s Liberation Army (dogwhistles?) as the most fearful enemy. But he didn’t compare CCP policies to GOP or Trump administration (apple to apple comparison). He doesn’t frame it as Anthropic vs Moonshot competition either. He deliberately frames it as the US vs the Communists war.He portrays the biggest ever threat of AI as the Chinese Military using the models in their drones. He already sells his models to military customers, US and potentially allies, and they are actively used in the field.
So no objective argumentation here. Just Nationalist political rhetorics and FUD. He’s allowed to do that and he will have an audience. But he won’t be taken seriously outside the US. He appears blindsided.
by thaway7388
7/28/2026 at 7:47:02 AM
>Also everything hes saying about China (and other actors) many outside the USA would say about the USA.Yes, I for sure trust the open models from China, more than anything coming out of the USA at the moment.
Its not just the USA's support for genocidal regimes, nor its heinously illegal wars and atrocious 21st century human rights record. Its also the Snowden revelations and the treatment of Julian Assange.
Slowly, surely, the world is building a firewall against the USA's imperialist actions - not just its motives. That AI is a key building block of that machination is of course, highly exciting.
There are many in Europe who feel the same. The tide is very definitely turning.
by aa-jv
7/28/2026 at 4:43:16 AM
Why is it relevant what those outside would say about the US? Or what those outside of any country would say about any country. The job of a country is to do what is best for it. It's better for the US to not help China develop AI that surpasses its own capabilities. It's better for China to try anyway. There are many countries inventing nothing with loud opinions. Those opinions are completely irrelevant to China or the US.by Petersipoi
7/28/2026 at 4:51:38 AM
> The job of a country is to do what is best for it.Countries aren't defined like corporations in the US. Why would countries have funds to help places like Haiti otherwise?
Lots of different reasons for countries to do all sorts of things? Why would France have armed the US during their independence movement? Why is the rest of the world supporting Ukraine during this war started by Russia?
by soperj
7/28/2026 at 5:56:13 AM
You mean to say that without France’s help the “revolutionary war” would just be an embarrassing string of failures and a footnote in Britain’s history?Oh no, you heretic, The People freed themselves and it was ordained by God, you see. It is through the righteous might of The Greatest Experiment in The History of the World that they showed The World what Freedom really meant.
by shsjidhs
7/28/2026 at 5:57:28 AM
Having the British lose the US was a good thing for France, simillarly preventing Russia from just taking over another country is for the best of other countries.While there is no "job" of a country, it is natural that each one will work for its own best interest and any moves it makes in the global world is due to their own vested interests in some way including helping Haiti, France helpong Us and the world supporting Ukraine.
Why would a country act against its interest or just randomly? Alliances and corporation are a part of politics
by altmanaltman
7/28/2026 at 3:24:54 PM
> Why would a country act against its interest or just randomly?So why is the US supporting Russia again?
> Having the British lose the US was a good thing for France
This seems a bit reductionist. Why would they give the Statue Liberty to the US if they were only in it for the British loss?
by soperj
7/28/2026 at 8:53:44 PM
The US independency war and the statue of liberty are two centuries apart.by flaburgan
7/28/2026 at 10:44:36 PM
Ah yes, I remember when they towed it into the New York Harbour in the early 70s, Richard Nixon was there to dedicate it.by soperj
7/28/2026 at 3:34:05 PM
Because Trump blackmailed with Epstein files by Russians.by oneshtein
7/28/2026 at 7:07:11 AM
>Why would a country act against its interest or just randomly?Because country as an entity is a mental construction for which "interest" is a categorical error. It’s certainly a useful concept, but pretending it has interests like some human individual can have have interests. Sure it can serve as rhetorical facility to sell some arguments.
Countries don’t have interests. Some people willing to take control of other people encompassed in that "country" groups have interests, and they don’t necessarily align with best interests of everyone or even majority in each of these groups.
by psychoslave
7/28/2026 at 7:31:46 AM
I mostly agree, but there is some limit to that line of argument: a corporation is also a human, social concept, and we do accept that they act in their own interests (meaning they do have interests, sort of like humans do)by dgellow
7/28/2026 at 9:37:48 AM
Well, you might agree with that, but on my side corporation are pure legal fictions, they don’t have have any intrinsics will and interest. That doesn’t mean they don’t have any existence, just that that there are have a different ontological status from a human person. Just like novel fictional characters, the fact they don’t map to any actual entity doesn’t mean they can’t entice affects they are supposed to convey between narrators and readers.by psychoslave
7/28/2026 at 5:11:20 AM
> Why would countries have funds to help places like Haiti otherwise?because that's what they think is best. what point are you trying to make? that countries don't pursue 'profit' at the expense of all other concerns?
by testaccount28
7/28/2026 at 5:31:07 AM
I think that that "best" is not always measured in money. And it should not be. Countries are made of people, and people wellbeing should be the main priority of country. And when stepping a bit back, all countries are made of people, so why differentiate? Ideally make life good for all people.by vincnetas
7/28/2026 at 5:00:25 AM
Why should the national security concerns of the US lie with Anthropic?by Davidzheng
7/28/2026 at 5:08:42 AM
Why does it feel like you think you're talking to only people in the US?There's plenty of people on this forum that aren't American. Including some former allies whose sovereignty has been aggressively threatened. And some of those people are Anthropic customers.
Even more so, many of us are in countries that would be well within the blast radius of fallout should the US try to "ban" open weight models or make moves to limit "US" models (often developed on research or work by non-Americans too, but that's another topic) only to those blessed by the US gov't.
That's why it matters?
by cmrdporcupine
7/28/2026 at 7:33:11 AM
Not just customers, Anthropic has offices in multiple countries around the world. And hires people from all around the worldby dgellow
7/27/2026 at 11:12:58 PM
Yeah some real main character energy from Dario as usual.I'll never get why he thinks China would just sit there and let the US dominate them in AI when all it would take is a few of their boats blockading Taiwan to put a stop to it all.
by m_ke
7/28/2026 at 12:09:52 AM
This Onion meme is perfect; you could easily replace Sam with Dario: https://theonion.com/sam-altman-if-i-dont-end-the-world-some...by rubslopes
7/28/2026 at 7:12:56 AM
You don’t need to replace them. Dario is the “someone” in question.by cassianoleal
7/29/2026 at 3:38:40 PM
Saying "all it would take" and then describing an act of war is an interesting opinion.by xnx
7/28/2026 at 12:49:38 AM
What exactly happens to a "losing" country when it has been AI "dominated"?by brokenmachine
7/28/2026 at 3:17:02 AM
You already have examples. Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, Libya… maybe Japan? The list is sort of long. Juxtapose or something.by crossroadsguy
7/28/2026 at 3:46:19 AM
And here I was thinking that all of those had nothing to do with AI.by brokenmachine
7/28/2026 at 4:33:01 AM
Oh. I thought a whole lot of the point and discussion of this post was AI being potentially weaponised and becoming means of economic and military control and coercion. Or did I really miss something?by crossroadsguy
7/29/2026 at 6:17:56 AM
Which of those country examples have AI being used as a means of economic and military control and coercion?Ukraine and Iran, no. I'm not familiar with the others.
by brokenmachine
7/28/2026 at 4:45:59 AM
Yes and no. Yes because it's more about oil than AI, no because AI is the oil industry and their supporting vested financial interests' (not so secret) plan to keep demand for fossil fuel high if/when the climate change deniers lose."We would love to use green energy, but all the batteries and solar panels come from China and China is evil, and we need all the energy we can get to run the data centres we need to spy on our citizens so they don't revolt once the environment is literally on fire, we can't feed them, provide enough energy to cool them, and refuse to build enough housing to house them."
by mctaylor
7/28/2026 at 4:37:26 AM
Why is the US so scared of this fate? To the rest of the world, they're tecnofeudalist monopolists.by alightsoul
7/28/2026 at 3:56:20 AM
or you can image, what exactly happens to a "losing" country when it has been a small clique "dominated"?by PangXJ
7/27/2026 at 11:16:10 PM
wouldn't stop AI companies from continuing to develop using their current infrastructure.the West could retaliate by halting shipments of photoresist and other materials to China.
meanwhile, Intel second-sources Nvidia and starts pumping out GPUs.
the economic fallout would be devastating as trade wars and export bans on both sides make Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs look like NAFTA.
by sterlind
7/27/2026 at 11:26:46 PM
The rest of the world would likely side with China. The export ban on Fable wasn’t even extended to five eyes countries.US is going to find itself isolated and irrelevant. And not a moment too soon.
by chrismsimpson
7/27/2026 at 11:49:53 PM
I do wonder what the world will look like under a chinese hegemony though...by matheusmoreira
7/28/2026 at 2:02:52 AM
China is very inward-looking, though. It's not really interested in world domination in the same sense that Europe was or even the USA was/is.by marcus_holmes
7/28/2026 at 2:21:53 AM
China has been aggressively developing infrastructure and financial services all over Africa and the rest of Asia.by nativeit
7/28/2026 at 4:58:13 AM
Yeah I saw this in Cambodia when I lived there. Sihanoukville had become a Chinese enclave almost completely.Different to the way that French colonialism worked, though. Less direct government, more influence of existing power structures and respect for the local government.
There is definitely an argument that this is plain business investment - China has a lot of foreign currency to invest because of its trade surplus, and there isn't the opportunity within China to invest it all, so it is engaging with trade partners to invest in their economies so that they can increase future trade with China.
You can also make the argument that this is not benign and China is trying to create control over foreign governments with this investment.
I'm kinda "both can be true, but either are better than how we did it"
by marcus_holmes
7/28/2026 at 5:26:30 AM
Go ask anyone in Southeast Asia which they'd rather have colonize them: USA or China.They'll usually refer to China in terms like the "thousand year enemy".
by Der_Einzige
7/28/2026 at 6:40:25 AM
> Reversing last year’s trend, a slim majority of ASEAN respondents selected China (52.0%) over the US (48.0%) if the region were forced to align itself with one of the two strategic rivals.https://www.iseas.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/The-Stat...
by jampekka
7/28/2026 at 7:26:20 AM
I’ve only been to Vietnam but the answer there is it’s… complicated.They’re culturally part of the sinosphere but of course constantly living in the shadow of your much, much bigger neighbour to the north does breed some ill feeling.
The USA on the other hand, well, they’re not particularly popular either for obvious reasons
by ifwinterco
7/28/2026 at 12:39:45 PM
The irony is much of the China-ASEA acrimony seems to be over China's aggressive territorial claims in the South China Sea.Which was a dumb move because, given Chinese economic superiority, they could have just quietly negotiated 99 year military base leases and oil/gas extraction with the UN-recognized territorial owners.
Same outcome, less bad blood.
Seems a bit of an own goal to militarily force the issue and antagonize its neighbors, who it's trying to convert to its sphere of influence.
by ethbr1
7/28/2026 at 5:59:54 PM
Yes the whole "wolf warrior diplomacy" stuff in the late 2010s was massively counterproductive for China and just pushed everyone else in the pacific back into the arms of the Americans.The mask (if there ever was one) slipped and they revealed a lot of information they probably should have kept hidden about their intentions for no real reason.
However they did eventually realise this, they've completely changed tack and they're having a lot more success (helped by the US adopting their own failed policy).
You're right though, I'd imagine politicians in SEA countries haven't forgotten
by ifwinterco
7/28/2026 at 6:05:05 AM
Ask Latin America which they'd rather have colonize them.by amunozo
7/28/2026 at 6:53:18 AM
We don’t want anyone to colonize us just like you don’t want your country to be colonized. China offers business opportunities while the USA and Europe seem to always look down on everyone else and impose their own values on others. China does not give a shit about how we run our countries as long as they can trust that deals will be honored. We don’t want to be taught how great your democracy is or whatever, we want our countries to become better by our own efforts, with fair deals when dealing with other nations.by brabel
7/28/2026 at 7:22:43 AM
This 100%. We’re neither the back yard of the USA, nor the front yard as Biden said, probably thinking that was a good thing.Get the F off our lawn and stop dumping your rubbish on it!
by cassianoleal
7/28/2026 at 12:43:02 PM
> We’re neither the back yard of the USAGo tell them, half of my country wants to CONTINUE being the USA backyard.
by brazukadev
7/28/2026 at 12:58:38 PM
That's a worrying trend in the region.by cassianoleal
7/28/2026 at 7:18:25 AM
Yes, of course, sorry for the expression. I just mirrored the expression used in the parent comment. What I mean is that the US have caused a lot of pain in Latin America.by amunozo
7/28/2026 at 7:23:57 AM
Grass is greener on the other side. Hegemony on the other side of hemisphere is greener or benevolent.by worldthruword
7/28/2026 at 6:04:03 AM
That really depends on who you ask. If it's that bad then why did all of those countries sign up for the RCEP?by FooBarWidget
7/28/2026 at 5:37:09 AM
They've mostly been concerned with resource extraction rather than colonial exploitation like the West. And in fact, they've ditched most of their infra and tech projects in Africa, because of inherent instability in dealing with tinpot dictatorships.On the other hand, every one in Asia is wary of too much Chinese presence and influence.
by fakedang
7/28/2026 at 3:35:50 AM
resource extractionstealth colonialism
by fnord77
7/28/2026 at 4:47:25 AM
The alternative is western colonialism Africa experienced before, and bombing campaigns.by d5lt5
7/28/2026 at 4:56:41 AM
Western colonialism is better than eastern colonialism tho. Look at the Russian orgs in Africa.by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 8:09:40 AM
Single counterexample for single counterexample: Belgium's Leopold - not sure if Western colonialism is so much better (and notice I didn't even bring up "western India")by subscribed
7/28/2026 at 12:17:03 PM
Not so much better but better in general compared to the middle eastern/eastern colonialism.. westerners have good competiton that the atrocities will be self corrected by itself but middle eastern/eastern colonies needed external western support like Korean war, hiroshima/nagasaki.. main example I can think of opposite is china under deng but there too deng had become relatively capitalist to fix the issues.by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 5:03:26 AM
Better for whom? Certainly not the colonised...by marcus_holmes
7/28/2026 at 5:08:41 AM
Yeah for the ones who get colonized, western ones were better than eastern ones. Japanese ones would've made Britishers look like kids when they were occupying eastern India.by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 6:00:52 AM
You just put Russia and Japan as "Eastern"; they have nothing to do with each (and I would consider both as more Western than Eastern regarding imperial/colonial matters) other nor with China. China is a massive country that has always been massive and rich. Their style is more like the tribute systems they had before, as it is being observed in the BRI and other projects.by amunozo
7/28/2026 at 7:44:17 AM
I understand China but in no way were japan and Russia close to western. IJA, MAO and soviet union makes westerners look like chuds. Russians still have the wagner group shit which is nowhere near what western countries have currently.by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 10:51:38 AM
First, sadly, the west is full of similar examples, like Leopold II in Congo, Nazi Germany, the Bengal and Irish famines in the British empire, transatlantic slave trade... Not to talk about similar genocides perpetrated by third nations but with the support of the west like the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. I see quite a lot of similarities. The West is not a moral example of anything at all, but the opposite.But second, Russia is not Eastern, it was more European than anything else until the Soviet Union. And Japanese Empire drew inspiration in the Western nations, even if they took it a even more horrible twist. So blaming this on "the East" is racist and reductionist.
by amunozo
7/28/2026 at 12:31:50 PM
Western countries have good internal competition that the atrocities they commit can be stopped by themselves whereas middle eastern/eastern ones needed external support for reformation famously hiroshima, deng reforms, soviet dissolution, korean war.. west is superior in terms of liberalism and capitalism that any successful country you can think of now has roots in utilising its ideas.. this is not to downplay atrocities committed by westerners but to think that somehow western nations are worse than eastern is being in denial. Russia was more european before the communists started their revolution and made themselves anti-west. They support many kinds of anti western movements like their war crimes in Africa, support for iranian/Islamist regimes, support dictatorship of china etc. these are all happening right now.. you are talking as though churchil wantedly cause famine in India when there's limited resource and he had to take care of his country before shipping to India and there was some amount of corruption too in Bengal at that time.. I'm not saying that they're blame free but it's a complex issue with multiple causes..even the AI that was trained on mostly using western data and infrastructure that chinese models distill and all..
by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 7:18:38 PM
I did not say Eastern are better, but rather that they are not worse. And having good economies (that started with colonization, slavery and imperialism) has nothing to do with morals, rather the opposite. You can be extremelly efficient at exploiting people. Western genocides are complex, but Eastern ones are pure evil? That is what I mean, this is just racism.by amunozo
7/29/2026 at 11:29:23 AM
Then you mean they are equal right? Which is also blatantly false. Capitalism and liberalism alone would compensate for many of the drawbacks caused by western atrocities. You talk as though colonisation, slavery, imperialism was only done by western when eastern/non-capitalist countries do that routinely since ancient times. Those are human nature and any system u can imagine has its traces rooted in ancient civilizations. I'm also from India and I know what the British did was bad but even before that there were issues within ourselves. But it was nothing to what the Japanese alone did when they occupied just a few parts of India. Exploiting people lol.. as though there aren't different levels of exploitation between now and then and the freedom to choose to work in different places now.. this is just plain old Marxism.. i must have internalized racism jz cz West is better in terms of liberalism and prosperity and reform than East..by CaptWorld
7/29/2026 at 11:33:15 AM
> i must have internalized racismYes.
by owebmaster
7/29/2026 at 11:36:27 AM
Sorry ignore the other reply.. i thought I lost my comment..> Yes
Beyond parody .. as expected of Marxist thinking..
by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 5:22:26 AM
You know the British invented the concentration camp in Africa, right?We're told a relatively benign version of our history. You kinda have to travel to the countries involved to get the real version.
by marcus_holmes
7/28/2026 at 5:30:10 AM
Even with all the downsides of being colonized by Britain, it was still far better than being colonized by Belgium. Heck, being colonized by pretty much anybody but Belgium was better than being colonized by Belgium. Read up on the Belgian Congo sometime: it was a parade of horrors.GP was making a relative comparison; pointing out that both were bad in absolute terms does not negate the point. -2 is still greater than -17.
by rmunn
7/28/2026 at 6:10:14 AM
Who cares who invented it first. Who did it best? Japans concentration camp was unholy abomination and it doesn’t get enough attention todayby kajaktum
7/28/2026 at 5:23:09 AM
How can you see the road not taken?by edoceo
7/28/2026 at 7:41:19 AM
You check existing conditions and extrapolate.by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 11:48:55 PM
"whatever happens we have the maxim gun"Well if we take India as an example we have the Bengal famine.
by Hikikomori
7/29/2026 at 4:13:14 PM
For the love of God, you guys are brain broken.. there's a limited resource and churchill didn't want to provide to India because of that and add that there's some major corruption in Bengal at that time that caused it.. you guys don't see nuance at all..by CaptWorld
7/29/2026 at 6:13:06 PM
India had a system in place to handle famines, Brits decided to do away with it setting the stage to allow millions to die. Was it also just corruption that caused millions to die during the Irish famine?by Hikikomori
7/28/2026 at 4:50:16 AM
I keep hearing this and I fail to see any reason to believe that it will be the case. Any empire, in the history of our species, has always had an initial "inward-looking" period prior to becoming a full-fledged imperialist oppressor. Edo-period Japan into Imperial Japan, for example. Rather, what I think any budding empire needs a period of growth to become a large enough fish and also to delude its leadership and population into the convenient mindset that their flavour of imperialism is good and justified ("Hakkou ichiu", "The white man's burden", etc.).To me, the PRC is at the very end of that process and I recommend anyone doubting this to go and read conversations and listen to the words of the populace that is turning increasingly nationalistic and you will hear the same old tales of revanchism and exceptionalism that we are used to hearing (during my recent visit, I watched the morning news every day for about a week and without fail a military inspection, new ship, new plane, etc. was presented each day). In addition, I think those outside of Asia are very much shielded from the early signs, but go and read about PRC influence and tensions in South Korea, Japan, RoC, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, and Tajikistan and you will see something rather different than "inward-looking". To me, here the PRC is simply testing the waters for the extent of the influence of other powers and how far it can go. Likewise, we are seeing overseas naval bases being constructed which sure is an indication for a desire to project power outwards.
I want to believe that this time it will be different. I really do. Apologists around me say "It will only be Taiwan and the South China Sea, then then it will stop." and I would love to believe them. But can anyone truly internalise the narrative that international utopia will be spearheaded by a deeply authoritarian state that controls information like no other (and gladly exports that technology), disappears its own population at will, spins an increasingly strong nationalistic narrative, etc.? No, sorry, I think the "inward-looking" narrative is simply a convenient way for us to close our eyes and find comfort in ignorance, rather than in facts.
by ninjin
7/28/2026 at 5:01:20 AM
You may well be right, and it's really only that China has been more inward-looking recently, and given the chance it will spread its true colonial wings.by marcus_holmes
7/28/2026 at 5:27:58 AM
Not sure if "colonial" is the right word though, as we should be careful to think that oppression always takes on the form we have seen in the past (US imperialist oppression for example did not take on the form of the colonialism that preceded it) . Also, be careful with "true" there. I do not think this is some sort of subterfuge, but rather an inherent weakness in us as a species. Vest power in anyone, and before long their morals will give way and an oppressor will be born.The way I look at it, until Deng the PRC's economic policies and internal instability kept it from growing at the pace of many of its neighbours. Then we had an era of intense growth (which is still to some degree ongoing). However, as a reaction to this era Xi and others needed a narrative to counter the increased corruption and a new unifying myth to replace the cult of growth as the economy would stagnate at some point and could then call into question the authority of CCP to rule. Their choice of nationalism is what scares me and I know PRC citizens (even CCP members) that share this perspective and would rather have seen the Shanghai clique to have remained. It is possible that in this alternative reality we would still end up with "Imperialism with Chinese characteristics" ("中国特色帝国主义"?), but I chose to believe that at the very least the chances of this would have been smaller.
by ninjin
7/28/2026 at 6:59:39 AM
So let’s just guess what China will do once it becomes dominant and act like it already did whatever we conjured up they will do. That’s how you get preventive wars that destroy civilizations without any actual basis on reality.by brabel
7/28/2026 at 7:19:11 AM
No, I do not think that is a fair portrayal of my position. Just like I will not say that your position is simply appeasement and hoping for the best. One must always be charitable in a discussion with strangers whose positions you do not fully understand.Rather, I think we should look hard into ourselves and what is good and bad about the current world order. For example, the people of the RoC have the right to determine which direction they want to go. Regardless of the chauvinistic rhetoric coming out of Beijing. We should all stand up for this, because it is a universal right that we want everyone to enjoy. Similarly, we should push against the Eleven-dash line and support the 2013 ruling. The list goes on and I am sure these issues can be resolved without an outright war if we are careful, yet firm, in our beliefs and also diplomatically preemptive and thoughtful.
Being concerned about PRC imperialism should not be mistaken for the position that their people should "know their place" and be suppressed back to the stone age. They have the right to enjoy the fruits of their labour and pursue happiness, just like everyone else. We simply must be there to remind them (just like we must remind ourselves) that the course of humanity is a collective project if we are to stay clear of the darker sides of our nature as we venture together into the future.
by ninjin
7/28/2026 at 8:30:22 AM
Do you believe the UK has the right to rule over the Maldives? And the USA has the right to have a military presence in Guam (and nearly all of the Pacific Ocean for that matter)?The Chinese claims on the South Pacific Islands seem really similar to me.
Taiwan seems like a wholy different matter. It was united with China for hundreds of years until the Japanese colonialists took over. It united again with China after WWII but split up after a few years because of the Chinese civil war (notice it was an internal war). I think it's just fair that China wants to re-unite with Taiwan, though I definitely don't support a military takeover. Hopefully a solution similar to what was done in Hong Kong can be found. The Tibet region had a similar history and it's definitely unfortunate that China had to use military force to bring it under its own control (arguably completely unnecessarily - China would be just as strong today without it), but it's kind of understandable in the context of the time (China was trying to recover from centuries of being preyed on by other nations).
I am saying this because I can't agree that China is acting imperialistic - it's basically claiming sovereignty over its own historical lands - which were taken away from them by force by foreign colonial powers. But I admit that, if you go back far enough, nearly all land was once taken over by aggressors - the USA being just a more recent example of that.
Anyway, thanks for not being an absolutist and trying to understand the "other" side (I must acknowledge I have no relation to China whatsoever, in fact I am from South America and live in Europe).
by brabel
7/28/2026 at 12:49:43 PM
> Hopefully a solution similar to what was done in Hong Kong can be found.Citizens of Hong Kong lost their right to free speech and their ability to select their own leaders. If you publicly criticize Xi Jinping in Hong Kong you will go to jail. If you advocate democratic rights in Hong Kong you will go to jail.
China's claims on Taiwan are ethno-nationalist. Ethno-nationalism should be rejected in all forms because it is a rejection of fundamental human rights. Taiwan deserves the world's support because it is functioning democracy. That makes all the difference.
by loudmax
7/28/2026 at 1:10:38 PM
I do not have a stance on the Maldives, Guam, etc. as I lack enough historical and current context. What I always do is try to derive positions based on the human right to self-determination.About Taiwan. I find the claim that since an absolute monarchy controlled the island 150 years ago, that then a government which was the result of two (is my count correct?) revolutions overthrowing that monarchy and then another government, a government which failed to conquer the land by military means by 1950, and now after people have lived independently for over 75 years (over 25 of which as a democracy) that said government has any right to dictate how said people should live to be simply absurd. If the people of the RoC wants to join with the PRC, that is for them to decide through their own decision processes. Historical claims like this may make sense for unpopulated tracts of land, but here we are talking about the rights to self-determination of more than twenty million people of which the vast majority were born well after 1950. This would set a terrible precedence and, frankly, it feels akin to how emperors and kings of old asserted their "rights" and not how we move towards a more just world.
Also, Hong Kong? If anything, Hong Kong shows that the PRC is a poor custodian for a pluralistic country with multiple parallel systems. I once thought it reasonable for Hong Kong to be "returned" after the historical travesty that were the Opium Wars, but I have heard enough first-hand accounts of the suffering and tragedy that unfolded over the last ten years to reconsider whether I prioritise history over the people that are alive here and now. It was not that Mao and Xi "unfortunately had to use force" against Tibet and Hong Kong. These were calculated choices on their part and history shall judge them the same way we judge any other oppressor for their moral failures.
by ninjin
7/28/2026 at 5:23:18 AM
Except of course for claiming all of the South China seas. See the Nine-dash lineby Khaine
7/28/2026 at 6:01:14 AM
"Not interested in world domination" LOL. That's what Putin said 10 years ago.by elisbce
7/28/2026 at 4:46:00 AM
It has been quite good at indebting countries to them, in Africa but also e.g. Montenegro.by gpvos
7/28/2026 at 5:25:57 AM
Africans are more indebted to Western multilateral organizations and private Western bondholders than to the Chinese. The idea that Africans are being finessed by the Chinese is racist and stems from a "we know what's good for you" imperialistic lens.by MaxPock
7/28/2026 at 5:57:52 AM
Interesting. I'm just relaying what I read in quality newspapers over here. And it's not just Africa. Anyway, you may be right. Do you have numbers?by gpvos
7/28/2026 at 12:57:54 AM
better dim sum, hopefully. the local chinese food is a crime against gastronomy.by a34729t
7/28/2026 at 2:28:32 AM
You’re already seeing it. Strategic bilateralism.by chrismsimpson
7/28/2026 at 6:01:56 AM
It's called Tang and Ming dynasty. We already know.by FooBarWidget
7/28/2026 at 3:55:57 AM
Keep an eye on Central Asia and Pakistan then? They are heavily infuenced by China.by petre
7/28/2026 at 12:51:27 AM
We are moving from unipolar hegemony to multipolar. There will be upwards of a dozen poles in timeby verdverm
7/28/2026 at 12:53:01 AM
Doubt. China is clearly on a level of its own compared to virtually every other country out there other than the USA.by matheusmoreira
7/28/2026 at 1:02:19 AM
I find it unlikely to be a duoply of hegemony for long, some countries to watch are Germany, Japan, India, Nigeria, and Brazil. You could broaden the geography to continents were I expect major players to emerge on each.We are only a few decades since the "end of history" and much has changed. What do things look like beyond 2050?
by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 1:43:16 AM
> BrazilBrazil is basically the world's soy farm. It's at least half a century behind the times. I still have no idea how it managed to insert itself into the BRICS economic block. The notion that it's on the same level as China, India or Russia is just comical.
by matheusmoreira
7/28/2026 at 2:19:59 AM
> Brazil is basically the world's soy farmTo reduce a culture and country like this comes off as bigotry
In example, Brazil has the #3 airplane producer in the world
Or consider why the US is doing all it can to prevent their payment system from becoming widely used?
I was intentional about putting the perspective in the future over today as the poles of the world are evolving
by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 5:43:04 AM
It's my culture and my country.All of the small miracles you listed happened in spite of the culture, not because of it. It's also not a coincidence that both are deeply linked to the most successful brazilian enterprise: the brazilian government.
I'm trying to avoid getting too deep in these Brazil tangents so I'm gonna leave it at that. Anyone who cares enough to know what I think about the subject can just look up my comment history.
by matheusmoreira
7/28/2026 at 2:50:47 PM
thank you for sharing your lived experienceTimothy Snyder, in On Tyranny, has a chapter about staying in touch with friends from other countries, and while we are not friends, this thread is in that spirit and I have learned things from you, so thank you!
by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 3:48:14 AM
OP is one of many Brazilians that hates Brazil, which ironically is the reason why the country historically can't grow to its full potentialby owebmaster
7/28/2026 at 5:28:58 AM
A lot of AI researchers were just in Brazil due to ICLR. A number of them got robbed in broad daylight in this supposedly nice part of Rio. I think the assesment of Brazil is accurate.by Der_Einzige
7/28/2026 at 6:05:38 AM
Not accurate, since it doesn't explain the normalized violence you observed. I was trying to be nice.This thread is more like it:
by matheusmoreira
7/28/2026 at 3:58:55 AM
s/bigotry/fatalism/ ? (in the same sense of colloquial usage with Russians)by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 12:13:46 AM
No worse than under US hegemonyby greekrich92
7/28/2026 at 1:49:51 AM
Much much worse: see Tibet or Hong Kongby thesmtsolver2
7/28/2026 at 7:06:58 AM
Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan...by one33seven
7/28/2026 at 5:24:25 AM
care to explain why all governors of Hong Kong under the british rule were white males?by tw1984
7/28/2026 at 11:33:46 AM
Because the only period HK got a wind of freedom was after the signature of the retrocession still .... SARS.by Foobar8568
7/28/2026 at 3:53:37 AM
How is Hong Kong worse than say, Puerto Rico?by owebmaster
7/28/2026 at 7:28:54 AM
[flagged]by worldthruword
7/28/2026 at 12:31:23 AM
certainly better than this one. Look at Africa under western neocolonialism vs China's infrastructure loansby TheArcane
7/28/2026 at 1:48:48 AM
As someone from India and someone who knows people from Tibet, Chinese hegemony will be much much worse.There is no HN equivalent in China where users advocate that US hegemony will be better.
by thesmtsolver2
7/28/2026 at 2:13:20 AM
On the other hand, India is enemies with China and Tibet is a highly oppressed region. I wonder what the average Chinese in china thinks.by alightsoul
7/28/2026 at 4:17:55 AM
The average German in Nazi Germany probably didnt think the Nazis were too bad either (of course the average citizen wasn't Jewish, gay, communist or other undesirables). That the average Chinese think things are “just fine” doesn’t mean they are.by ido
7/28/2026 at 4:41:48 AM
Unlike Nazis, I don't see that Chinese communists have expansionist goals to seize territory. Nazis wanted all of Europe. Do Chinese communists want all of say southeast Asia?by alightsoul
7/28/2026 at 4:52:26 AM
South China sea, Tibet, Uyghuria, Taiwan. And definitely dominance over SE Asia even though no direct conquest.by gpvos
7/28/2026 at 4:55:20 AM
Yeah capitalist countries are the only imperialists. Every other country is a saint compared to the west.by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 6:59:41 AM
To be clear I don't think the government of China is as bad as the Nazis were. I'm just saying "the average Chinese in China thinks it's fine" doesn't mean it's fine.by ido
7/28/2026 at 1:42:58 AM
And that's going just swimmingly [0][0] https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/chinese-manager-beats... (possibly NSFW, I can't see the video in my browser but be warned)
by lenerdenator
7/28/2026 at 2:46:52 AM
There is no good imperialist power, there is no capitalism with a human face, there will never be. The UK murdered millions in India, Ireland and all around the world in their time. The US did the same. The only reason China isn't openly doing the same right now is because they are still the underdog and they still need cordiality to get through the door, just like the UK and the US did in their time. The solution is to rid the world of imperialism and capitalism as a whole. As long as there is a profit motive running through everything, international relations will be in the form of wars (military or economic). Only under socialism can the people of the world truly pool their resources together to build up instead of destroying each other.by vhantz
7/28/2026 at 7:14:03 AM
You would have to eradicate the desire to command other people. The wish for power which is different from the wish to be praised, as forcing somebody to do something is different from convincing somebody to do something.by pmontra
7/28/2026 at 5:00:39 AM
There are no good imperialists but it's a spectrum where western capitalist colonies fare much better than eastern communist colonies because capitalism and democracy is the engine for economic growth and western colonies fared much better than eastern ones. What's a better system than capitalism for imperialism? Socialism? Weren't they also pretty brutal imperialists? Japanese imperialists alone make western ones look like amateurs.by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 5:48:57 PM
> western colonies fared much better than eastern ones.Sure, Iraq and Afghanistan definitely benefited a lot from being bombed, occupied, and then handed over to even worse tyrants when the West got bored.
No, sorry, but "capitalism and democracy" is not the right answer everywhere, and when they're not, pushing them by force is no better than forcing communism. In general, forcing an incompatible ideology on people historically and culturally opposed to it will end in tragedy, no matter how great that ideology may be.
by klibertp
7/29/2026 at 11:53:15 AM
As tho they weren't shitholes before the intervention and those are the only examples when they themselves treat their citizens like trash by oppressing themselves and they got bombed because they're bored? Lol Idk if this is a parody of left wing thought or not.. surely you can make better arguments than boredom arguments and call them bogus..How are you not racist towards Arabs to think that they're not capable of liberalism? There needs to be some people at the right time and a place like al shaara seems to be doing incremental changes to reform syria.. pushing them by force is okay when they oppress their own citizens and threaten other nations with their own form of imperialism on sorrounding countries/allies.. are we supposed to fold and not help ukraine for example even though Ukrainians never got exposed to liberalism? It's to help and condition them to open to liberalism.. same is needed for iran but retard in chief can't do it properly..
by CaptWorld
7/28/2026 at 4:54:28 AM
China would just start buying oil again, and stop using it from their strategic reserve. Hello $200 barrels of oil.by soperj
7/27/2026 at 11:45:21 PM
> the West could retaliate by halting shipments ofChina quickly retaliated last time by stopping shipments of rare earths and magnets. The West has no answer for this, really up the river without a paddle for such critical supply chain elements.
by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 12:43:07 AM
I was led to believe that the US does have internal sources of these, but they are largely undeveloped. For years the processing could not economically compete with China so shutdown.Which is to say, given internal subsidies, the US could eventually produce some on its own.
Unless I misunderstood the situation.
by 0cf8612b2e1e
7/28/2026 at 12:49:21 AM
I believe we both share this understanding, the problems are1. China controls ~90% today
2. The US will find it difficult to build out because of how dirty and environmentally damaging mining and processing are.
I did see some research last week about a better way to process rare earths, but it is still research and will need to be industrialized.
Regardless, it will take many years (decade+?) to become self sufficient and China is already willing to and increasingly restricting them
by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 4:17:52 PM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084690https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-may-need-allo...
by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 5:29:01 AM
China controls way more things, from medical needles to pharmaceutical ingredient.Lots of them can be made in the west or west friendly countries, but that takes time, money, infrastructure and good execution. Yes, identical to what is covered in China's belt and road initiatives. See the gap now?
by tw1984
7/28/2026 at 12:53:49 AM
Dario is more of a threat to the US, in terms of advancements in AI, than China. In Dario's mind anything that can't be controlled competitively is a threat to Anthropic, so he positions his FUD strawman so that Dario doesn't have to worry about the competition. And then he can artificially inflate token costs so his IPO can happen. Dario doesn't actually care about ethics, alignment or availability of LLMs - he just likes to use those words to sound like he does. Yet we've all seen how Anthropic actually acts vs what they say.The scary part very few are talking about is that every compute device is Turing complete. So everything from the phone in your pocket to a DGX Spark is a threat to national security now since, technically, every device can run any model (how well is not a question of concern when you start to argue hardware should be gated just the same as Dario likes to gate models). I mean, along these lines of thinking Linux should not be available to the masses! What if someone runs some code that's not approved by the benevolent dictator for life, Dario? People will say: that can't happen, but the reality is it already is. If everyone has reasonable access to compute to run models that are mostly capable comparative to burning Anthropic tokens, why wouldn't they? It's risk reduction and price protection. Yet we can't buy those systems because of future production already being purchased by these organizations.
But back to the models themselves... We played this game with Metasploit back in the day: many who had no clue claimed exploit tools should be regulated and only available for use by those blessed, illegal elsewhere (I believe the closest this got was the Wassenaar delegation in the US, but only through collateral inclusion of "cyber weapons "). Except in that timeframe the authors of these tools weren't advocating for protection. Today the world is fine, systems improved because of security FOSS tooling. The same thing will happen with LLMs. Unless, that is, Dario gets his way. I'm not a fan of Altman but I think he's standing back watching this play out knowing what Dario is doing: either he succeeds and OAI benefits or Dario ends up the Chicken Little of AI and Anthropic fails to launch (their IPO).
The reality is Dario is only doing this because this is a real risk to his business. China's constraints in building competitively have given them an advantage: they are doing more with less. And if you think that their distilling from US models was in any way anti-competitive or illegal, then I guess maybe "deal with it", much akin to Anthropic, Google and OAI's response around taking the (copyright) content in the first place with no repercussions.
People who don't work in the AI bubble don't care at all about any of these people. They could all be gone overnight and the world would continue to innovate, probably in a much more productive manner, without them.
by windexh8er
7/28/2026 at 12:50:36 PM
> And if you think that their distilling from US models was in any way anti-competitive or illegal, then I guess maybe "deal with it", much akin to Anthropic, Google and OAI's response around taking the (copyright) content in the first place with no repercussions.Exactly. The cries in favor of distillation regulation from the US AI companies ring hollow and fearful.
OpenAI and Anthropic didn't realize that distillation was going to be so (a) effective and (b) un-technically-stoppable at scale.
Now they're seeing their IPOs at risk and clutching at governmental straws.
Dario's argument is transparently working backwards from {protect Anthropic's economic model} <- {need government regulation} <- {justify government regulation via AI fears} <- {we love open models, but so sorry they can't pass regulation}.
If the rise of the web in the 90s taught us anything, it should have been that companies that take economic reality as it exists thrive, while those that predicate their value on regulation fail.
If distillation at scale works and is technically feasible? That's reality. Deal with it.
by ethbr1
7/28/2026 at 3:42:39 AM
11 carriers are not just for show.by wbl
7/28/2026 at 4:47:17 AM
Could have fooled me, judging by the Iran and Yemen performance.by otabdeveloper4
7/28/2026 at 5:35:02 AM
Iran showed us that they apparently are.by fakedang
7/28/2026 at 2:58:22 PM
Don't confuse political limitations and lack of a theory of victory with the inability to achieve a goal. A blockade needs ships those ships can be destroyed.by wbl
7/28/2026 at 5:33:50 AM
> compared to his own closed and overpriced onesI don't understand how Anthropic or OpenAI can have overpriced models, yet losing money like there is no tomorrow. Taking their own numbers at face value, they claim a revenue of 24 billion (ARR, a dubious tool), spending 21 billion in operating losses and another 11 billion as "R&D" funneled straight to Microsoft pockets. That before all investments they are committing to in new data centers, equivalent to 20x their current revenue.
To be profitable (including capex), the cheapest subscription should at least $200/month for what is currently $20/month, that some already consider overpriced. Unless a miraculous collapse in inference costs happen in the next couple of years, or every single human being become a paying customer of ChatGPT (if they limit their usage to a couple of chats per day on average, to keep inference costs low!), maths don't add up.
by otherme123
7/28/2026 at 5:43:21 AM
It's possible for something to be overpriced to the customer and simultaneously underpriced for the business to be profitable. Theoretically speaking, they could just be selling such an inefficient product.by picture
7/28/2026 at 6:00:26 AM
It's also not a law of nature that there be a valid/efficient form of a product that makes a business profitable. I'm in no place to judge whether that's the case here, but not all products are viable.by dwattttt
7/28/2026 at 12:20:38 PM
You would need to demonstrate an impact for a line item that big. A 3k person org at $200/seat would be >$7mill/year. That places you very well into self hosting Kimi K3 territory and the never having: price hikes, dependency on a 3rd party, etc.AMD would love to come by and plop one of these into your datacenters: https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct/mi400..... Also, in a few generation, there will be a massive glut of used hardware.
Unless frontier labs can surpass the current models significantly I don't know why I would pay them money instead of hosting K3.
by gravypod
7/28/2026 at 5:50:19 AM
I guess that tracks with the brute force attempt at workable intelligence that is the Attention/stochastic token based systemby rf15
7/28/2026 at 4:43:13 PM
Market failure! Market failure is the term you're looking for.Also see: childcare, healthcare, many forms of public transport and social infrastructure. Some things markets simply cannot deliver well, and that's okay.
Daycare is the most easily reachable example because it's quite simple compared to the others. Daycare workers are simultaneously some of the lowest paid workers in the US, yet daycare costs are famously high and prohibitive, yet childcare centres are very far from money-printing machines. Margins in the daycare sector are most commonly < 1%.
by abalashov
7/28/2026 at 5:52:34 AM
Overpriced for the value provided, especially with the pay-as-you-go rates for enterprises; but also in stock prices.Pricing a product is generally about ensuring a profit on investment, but also a good RoI for your customers (or they will not pay).
With these long-term profit exercises, it's always a lot of hand-waving though.
by necovek
7/28/2026 at 7:51:32 AM
No one is forced into buying the product, so it feels like an emotional rather than a rational rant from OP.by shmichael
7/28/2026 at 5:53:03 AM
> I don't understand how Anthropic or OpenAI can have overpriced models, yet losing money like there is no tomorrow.The marginal cost of inference (which is roughly what you're going to pay to a provider that's running an open weight model) doesn't include the cost of training that model.
by murderfs
7/28/2026 at 7:36:21 AM
Add to that the >$700B OpenAI already committed to spend in infrastructure through 2030!by dgellow
7/28/2026 at 5:40:49 AM
Re. 'overpriced', I'm assuming OP talking about their theoretical stock price.by lwhi
7/28/2026 at 7:08:30 AM
Can we just downsize colonialism?by stevelini
7/28/2026 at 7:38:01 AM
Did you mean to respond to a different thread?by dgellow
7/28/2026 at 6:06:43 AM
Inference is only priced in for a low usage window 6h a day per customer?by 21asdffdsa12
7/28/2026 at 6:06:32 AM
I'd assume the gp was just inflating their rhetoric but cost of model is an interesting topic.I'd guess Anthropic and OpenAI's models are expensive relative to the cost of running the models but that the revenue still doesn't pay for building the next and next models. The challenge is how these next generation models are going to pay for themselves. Will everyone on earth find it useful to $200/month to talk to a thing more intelligent than themselves? The alternative is naturally that these are going to replace workers and employers will be the one paying.
by joe_the_user
7/28/2026 at 7:41:57 AM
The whole thing about replacing workers is such a perfect example of shooting yourself in the foot. The whole US economy is so strong because the population consumes so much. Get rid of the workers, you’re now damaging the consumer base. Repeat that a few times, across industries, and you now have a zombie economy. The idea that we can have an economy of virtual agents is a child idea that doesn’t make any sense in a serious situationby dgellow
7/28/2026 at 2:21:03 PM
Most people on earth don’t make $200/mo.by catlifeonmars
7/28/2026 at 10:12:33 AM
> Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!)Very good point. However, if one reads the transcript of the speech that Xi Jinping gave to the World AI Conference on 17 July, we see that he he is very much in favour of AI safety.
https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202607/17/content_WS6a5a1172...
> Second, we should strengthen risk-awareness and ensure that AI is secure and controllable. AI should be a trusted tool for humanity. We should take seriously the various types of inherent and secondary risks that AI may trigger. We should put in place laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems in order to strengthen the line of security, prevent abuses and malicious use, and ensure that AI is always under human control. In the meantime, we should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country's security over that of others.
Now, let's contrast another important part of safety here. Amodei puts the fact that this will need to be a global effort as a mere note that sure, China will need to help too:
> Note that to be effective, testing would need to be global, which means even the CCP would need to be on board. I think this may actually be possible: as I wrote in The Adolescence of Technology, limited cooperation around preventing AI biological weapons may be possible because it is in China’s interest too.
International collaboration is the focus of Jinping's speech. But one imagines "cooperation" Amodei has in mind if "do what I say" while Jinping has more collaboration in mind here. (Even if you think 'china bad' they deserve credit for collaboration for their open weight models).
by fnord123
7/28/2026 at 1:02:02 PM
China has yet to demonstrate weaponization of AI. Meanwhile Anthropic was openly part of the Iran war. I wouldn't give much weight to Amodei's words after that regarding controlling AI weaponization.by fakedang
7/28/2026 at 9:24:48 AM
Regular distilled models show capacity gaps and overfitting that open-weight models don't anymore I think. This focus on distillation as "more compute-efficient" (i.e. cheaper) seems to rather be an excuse for bad (or bubble) investment, fixed hardware dependency and lack of interest in research of efficient compute. Which also shows as climate and sustainability impact.Nvidia signed the open-weight model letter and Europe doesn't have better models either, so chips don't seem like the issue either. I guess good old performance optimisation is just not _cool_ anymore. So they use the same argument as politicians arguing "cheap products" are why tariffs are needed; when instead it's mismanagement.
Another HN user wrote the other day "live by the sword, die by the sword".
by janpeuker
7/28/2026 at 7:21:52 AM
I was reading the post and thinking "wow, that's pretty clear for a smart man used to writing for other smart men. it'll be really difficult to misunderstand". I read the first couple of comments and stand corrected.A much simpler summary:
- open models good.
- smart models _can_ be bad
- smart open models that can do biotech work are dangerous. worth the hassle of certification _if_ we can get everybody on board with minimalist certification.
- banning open models just in US is neither good or bad: is stupid.
by radu_floricica
7/28/2026 at 4:22:17 PM
The biotech work is not even these LLM models.Alphafold and others solving the protein folding problem are revolutionary.
An LLM can max provide an instructive tutorial protocol for lab work, but designing novel proteins is not it's job.
I am interested to enter the bioinformatics space eventually and the regulation happens at the DNA printer level. Anyone can design yeast nowadays that excretes heroin, but the DNA needed for the genetic modification won't be printed by anyone. As long as DNA printing tech is extremely regulated it's all fine, if home printing becomes a thing then on the other hand maybe people won't even need AI to print deadly pathogens at all. A database lookup will do.
by hoppp
7/28/2026 at 1:33:24 PM
Yeah makes everyone agree on banning Chinese models and then force them to use mine models. How I could misunderstand *that*.by npodbielski
7/28/2026 at 3:49:14 AM
> The reality is much less confusingThe reality is even less confusing than that: China is amused by the kvetching tactics. They know who their opponents are but are cunning enough to not reveal their cards.
by vanagandr
7/28/2026 at 9:36:38 PM
This take is poorly informed and poorly thought out. It's just a cynical vibe, not a cogent argument.If they wanted to squash the competitors, they'd advocate for a ban on Open-Weight models. How else are they going to prevent their release?
Anthropic's position is not that, so the cynical nefarious purpose argument isn't even rhetorically true. What they say openly, that open-weight models are harder to secure is absolutely true, and anyone unwilling to acknowledge that and let it inform their own reasoning is a risk.
If open-weight models keep being released near the frontier (or even worse, at the frontier), something bad will happen, and we'll have few tools to keep it from getting worse before it gets better. How bad is hard to lay a prediction on, it's perhaps lucky if it's something superficially bad that is a wake up call.
You cannot un-release an open-weight model, nor even post-release add a new restriction. Whatever mistakes you made are done and the only option is to fail-forward with every ounce of pain that entails.
Diverting from this important point by vibing cynicism is irresponsible. Cynicism is only a powerful tool when it opens you up to deeper reasoning, not when it diverts you from it.
by nedruod
7/28/2026 at 9:50:24 PM
> Anthropic's position is not that, so the cynical nefarious purpose argument isn't even rhetorically trueAnthropic's position is precisely that, they're just not honest and transparent about it so they are trying to sabotage or delay open weight models in any way they can, direct or otherwise.
> If open-weight models keep being released near the frontier (or even worse, at the frontier), something bad will happen, and we'll have few tools to keep it from getting worse before it gets better. How bad is hard to lay a prediction on, it's perhaps lucky if it's something superficially bad that is a wake up call.
Calling bullshit. Current open weight models are already pretty close to the frontier - if not there - and the world still spins. Even small(er, relatively) models occasionally surprise everyone by being amazing at certain tasks. Furthermore, closed weight models can do plenty of damage which even their creators occasionally can't control - cue the Huggingface incident of last week and how they had to use GLM to defend themselves. Closed weight models will create a 2-class (or more) world in which some actors will have access others won't (see Mythos, or GPT5.6-Sol when a user has the right flags) and potentially carry out attacks against which the have-nots are... not supposed to be able to defend themselves? Fuck that.
by gruturo
7/28/2026 at 10:00:57 PM
Ah, the position they don't state. So why respond to this press-release, which doesn't state that, since obviously it adds zero value? And why aren't the companies that signed the letter supporting open-weights, who have the same motivations, also lying? Since what they say isn't important, just what you say they say.On your second point. Everything fine (so far), so nothing bad will happen. Except, you say something bad will happen, and has happened, with HuggingFace as the example.
You say that example shows closed weight models can't be controlled. But what happened there is OpenAI turned it off after their incompetently long discovery period. If it was an open-weight model, the clear next step would have been someone deciding to use it to pursue a goal, for example getting some money or creating some chaos, and there would have been no one to turn it off.
It's totally incompetent of OpenAI to have been unable to detect and disable in a shorter time period, but you know what's worse? You do know what's worse, right?
by nedruod
7/28/2026 at 11:31:43 PM
> Ah, the position they don't state.Come on, we're not _that_ stupid. Their alarmist tones are the height of hypocrisy when they do release powerful models after spelling doom. Their safeguards and guardrails have been broken countless times - let's see if _this_ time the jailbreak detection in J-space actually puts a stop to them. But - really - they have trillions at stake, which evaporate once their edge is commoditized and inference providers have a near-equivalent product for much less. They're firing on all PR and lobbying cylinders to delay that just enough for their IPO to succeed, and leave investors holding the bag - I'd be terrified of their inclusion in tons of pension funds which track S&P500 or whatever they'll end up with (SpaceX, should the actual floating shares increase, and OpenAI worry me just as much).
On my second point: it happened, it keeps happening, it will keep happening all the time, and it's not new. Incredibly bright individual researchers, dodgy companies and state actors discovered, weaponized and traded vulns for, I don't know, 15 years before LLMs got involved? And it's not like they are out of a job now. The multiplier effect is not lost on me, but the fallout from even Mythos so far has been.... not that much, really? And I'm not completely ignorant there - I am security-adjacent and have close colleagues who specialize in that.
Also, indeed I know that a powerful open weight model in malicious hands is worse than OpenAI doing a whoopsie and cutting access off once they eventually realize it. But even a closed weight frontier model served by a non-US aligned entity could serve the purpose - and while I'm thinking of China, I do wonder what Russia may do - they used to be really good at this stuff and their leaders are not exactly the friendliest bunch around. Or India, or Iran, I hear they're a bit angry lately. Unlikely but let's say they develop or acquire the capability (ultimately it's some hardware + one leak away even for closed models). Asking them politely to stop may not be effective. Western society may pay the price of applying the brake and find itself out...modeled? is that a word? Because 2 guys called Sam and Dario, and their early investors, really want those returns? Come on we're not discussing the greater good here - it's a bunch of greedy guys trying to pull the ladder up after themselves. You do realize that, right?
Do we really owe them a moat?
by gruturo
7/29/2026 at 4:43:42 PM
If you think I've insinuated they don't have a motivation, you've misread. It's undeniable they have motivations (though I pointed out, the signatories and non-signatories all have the same motivations). From a PR perspective, the motivation would push toward being a signatory.My overall point is, don't let their motivations, nor your cynical conclusions based on those obvious motivations, blind you to your own point of view.
The debate here shouldn't be about the signatories motivations, it should be about the risks of open-weights coming too close to the untested frontier. You've acknowledged that now: "I know that a powerful open weight model in malicious hands is worse than OpenAI doing a whoopsie".
But I'm left a little confused about your position because you follow that up with what I can only describe as a set of "what-about"-isms. Yes, closed models could still be misused, especially in the wrong hands. Still, even worst case there, it's fewer hands. China is the only set of hands that's really relevant for now, no one else is close.
Without going into deep detail, fairly sure we both don't trust the Chinese government. But we also don't have a lot of practical choice on whether they have access to a model frontier-ish. What could be different is if Russian hackers, Malaysian hackers, Iranian hackers, etc. all have access too. In the open-weight model, they sort of do (somewhat constrained by compute.. but rounding up enough compute for a bit of inference is achievable even for them).
I should make it clear at this point that I think banning US companies from using open-weight models would be a totally ineffective policy that's just self-harm. Anthropic said the same and I agreed, but just in case that stance has become blurred, I'll re-clarify. It's probably more unclear because there really isn't a policy stance on the table that backs what the "maybe there shouldn't be frontier open-weight models", because any real and effective policy there would either have to be multi-lateral, or be the result of independent actions that just happens to align. So really, all that an independent actor like Anthropic can do is say "maybe there shouldn't be frontier open-weight models", which they did and see if that leads the world toward agreeing with that position, which might then lead to some action.
If that somewhat tenuous outcome ever did occur, it wouldn't really mean a "moat", as the Moonshot, Zhipu, Alibaba, Bytedance would still have a model and offer it via API. And they could still create agreements with US/EU/etc. cloud companies to host them, in the same way as other closed-models are hosted. But there'd be more control.
Yeah, there'd be some advantages to model providers, compute providers from this. There'd be some costs to potential customers and those that would self-deploy for good purposes. As little as I support those costs, and as much as I'd prefer not to hand out those advantages, my cynicism would not prevent me from realizing that it's a bigger problem that if you don't do this, you'll fail to harm the interests of those who would self-deploy for nefarious purposes.
by nedruod
7/29/2026 at 5:20:30 PM
> My overall point is, don't let their motivations, nor your cynical conclusions based on those obvious motivations, blind you to your own point of view.Very fair point, taken. So, setting aside Anthropic & Co's motivations: trying to restrict this is pointless without planetwide cooperation - I don't see China complying - and likely to just result in dividing people into haves and have-nots. Furthermore, allowing this access, nay, power, into the hands of the very crappy stewards around at the moment doesn't really protect anyone, just makes them richer. I'd stomach their endless lust for more money if it was just a side effect of making the world secure, but I don't see that happening either. What do you realistically do when China keeps advancing the SOTA? And really, all the other nations I mentioned - they're one leak (and a few H200s) away from acquiring the ability anyway. They don't need the ability to serve 250 million concurrent users to be dangerous, just a handful of instances in the hands of their government officers. Who are we withholding the knowledge from, at that point? For what benefit?
I won't even touch the point that this is.... ultimately, knowledge acquired by scraping the internet, so it should belong to everyone - and now they're even pissed off someone is "stealing it back" by distillation - nice discussion for another time.
Furthermore - this approach worked for nuclear weapons for a while as the material is really hard to source, supercomputers weren't available, centrifuges are hard, and good nuclear scientists were so few that they could be individually monitored or assassinated if they helped the wrong party (really). Fast forward to present day when there's no practical way to prevent NK or Iran from advancing their knowledge. We're trying the same obsolete approach, but it applies even less thanks to the Internet. Also, even then, a couple leaks in the 50s gave the soviet union parity - any parallels to our scenario?
I really appreciate your points, I agree with the danger, but I don't see any approach really fixing the situation, and those guys' proposal is just a get even richer quick scheme.
Finally, of all people, finally a day came where I find myself in full agreement with Zuck (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/technology/mark-zuckerber...). Obviously his motivation is also not lost on me - this is bad only because it's not him this time, but still, even a (morally) broken Zuck is occasionally right.
by gruturo
7/28/2026 at 8:07:39 AM
In short: "We don't propose a ban to open-weight models. we want to stop these models being developed altogether. If there are no models, there'll be nothing to ban".Oh also: "They ste^H^H^H distill what we have sto^H^H^H used fairly from the world. This is unfair".
Lastly: "What if they use their models in their military and local police services like we do? Communism!"
As always: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_AiI9_XIAA67_t.jpg?name=orig
by bayindirh
7/28/2026 at 8:30:49 AM
A bit of good old “it’s really good idea, I love it, great effort … BUT”Mixed with “if kids can’t get semi dangerous drugs from the back of my van then they will be forced to buy from even shadier, more dangerous dark web van”
by prymitive
7/28/2026 at 8:15:33 AM
A bit off-topic: I occasionally see that triple ^H on HN posts: what does that actually indicate?by Akronymus
7/28/2026 at 8:21:16 AM
A caret with a character subtracts 0x40 from its hex value allowing you to insert non-printable characters. Uppercase H is 0x48. That gives us hex 0x08 which is a backspace.https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USASCII_code_chart.s...
by TACIXAT
7/28/2026 at 8:18:48 AM
Ctrl-H is the rubout/backspace command on old terminals. So if I say it's nuts^H^H^H^Hunwise to ignore UNIX history, I've erased the first word and replaced it with the second.by grahamlee
7/28/2026 at 8:18:40 AM
In the old hardware terminals, and current terminal emulators, ^H (or CTRL+h) is "Backspace signal". It has the effect of pressing backspace.So, ^H^H^H means "delete three characters, excluding '^H's". Like the person typing the comment changes their mind and deletes the characters (or the word) before writing else.
It's an stylized way of euphemism. i.e.: Actually I want to say this, but I substitute it for that.
by bayindirh
7/28/2026 at 8:22:16 AM
Strikethroughby lynguist
7/28/2026 at 1:00:26 AM
Look, Big Tech has lost almost a trillion dollars in valuation in a SINGLE DAY. A few more of these downturns and the entire A.I. revolution will be stopped dead in its tracks and we won't have to worry about safety checks, DRAM shortage or open-weight models anymore.by hn_submit
7/28/2026 at 1:10:20 PM
On the one hand, Darius argues:> ...banning the use of these models by US businesses does nothing to address this risk, because bad actors are unlikely to be legitimate US businesses. It would protect US AI companies from competition, but that has never been my goal.
But on the other, he argues:
> All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing.
Models that don't pass safety testing would be banned. Darius does not appear to be against banning models. He wants the government to have a regulatory body that has the ability to ban models. Then Anthropic can do regulatory capture of that agency and control what models are permitted to be released.
Also, during this mandatory safety testing, models would be blocked from use, and by the time the testing was done (probably years) the models would be obsolete.
by VikRubenfeld
7/27/2026 at 11:12:30 PM
Exactly.And the article specifically talks on restricting hardware for the China and restricting China's open source models for the west. All while leading us on with "we're all for competition (but...)"
I think China did great by releasing AI innovation as open source, thereby limiting or sooner-bursting the AI bubble; which is clearly in their interest.
by flossly
7/27/2026 at 11:26:03 PM
The models are not open source. They are deeply proprietary since we have no access to the source materials and cannot reproduce the model independently. They are opaque binary blobs that the Chinese labs are just allowing other providers to run directly instead of only access through an API.by petcat
7/28/2026 at 12:45:25 AM
Do you expect any of the labs to have an accompanying data dump with: here’s every book ever written, newspaper article, song lyric, Disney movie, GitHub repo, etc. Oh, and we obviously never paid for any of this.Even if you did, I doubt training is bit-for-bit reproducible, so you will always have to take someone’s word for the final artifact.
by 0cf8612b2e1e
7/28/2026 at 5:15:55 AM
Sure. The models are still not open source and should not be called open source.by purpleflashing
7/28/2026 at 12:42:21 AM
> we have no access to the source materials and cannot reproduce the model independently.Given the USA companies have been loudly claiming the Chinese models are distillations of their models, also claiming "no access to source materials" seems dubious. As it was dubious anyway with because the Chinese publish lots of papers on how their models are designed, I'm left feeling I'm looking at the south end of a north bound bull.
by rstuart4133
7/28/2026 at 1:15:18 AM
Distillation of this kind isn't the only data that is fed into models, it's still a small minority. It might be weighed higher in training to learn the thinking patterns/etc but you need a lot more tokens.by usef-
7/28/2026 at 7:23:49 AM
Didn't Deepseek also publish a lot of research material on how they trained their model?That aspect is probably more important for an open model then the source materials
by gbalduzzi
7/27/2026 at 11:52:55 PM
Which is why we need the ability to train our own models. Maybe it will be viable to do it in a distributed computing setup one day. Research's already being done in that direction.by matheusmoreira
7/27/2026 at 11:50:34 PM
They are more than opaque blobs, some examples:- One can load them up in a model explorer to see the layers and other components, how it is designed
- One can fine tune the models, which requires adding LoRA to the model and then running some training iterations
by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 12:13:46 AM
You can make parallel arguments for binary executables.by nwiswell
7/28/2026 at 12:17:04 AM
model weights are more like a video file which has metadata about the format so any video player can play itwe run and change llm models with a variety of tools
by verdverm
7/28/2026 at 12:30:19 AM
Here's my thinking:Cloud:
- You cannot directly execute a remotely-hosted program.
- You cannot run inference on an API-served model.
---
Closed-source:
- You can execute a program with the binary. You cannot generate a new binary, but you could try to reverse-engineer it or (painfully) modify its execution.
- You can run inference on a model with the weights. You cannot re-produce a new set of weights from scratch, but you can fine-tune.
---
Truly open:
- You can freely modify the source and produce new binaries.
- You can use the original training data and model architecture to independently re-produce the weights (assuming you've got the compute). You can modify the model architecture to get the weights that would've resulted from training the model that way.
---
To me these are pretty clear parallels... I don't think the weights provided in a vacuum are in the spirit of open source, historically speaking.
The policy argument is totally separate, of course, and I fully understand why none of the frontier labs are truly open.
by nwiswell
7/28/2026 at 12:47:03 AM
> Closed-source: You can execute a program with the binary. You cannot generate a new binary, but you could try to reverse-engineer it or (painfully) modify its execution.Time have changed. This should be:
Closed-source: You point an LLM at it, and get back source that's often easier to understand than the original.
by rstuart4133
7/28/2026 at 3:28:07 PM
Imho this is still wishful thinking ... care to provide examples?by don_esteban
7/28/2026 at 9:43:16 AM
Let’s be honest, you don’t need a 3T model for bad actors, in fact you would be better off training a smaller focused model if you want an evil GPT.by dalemhurley
7/28/2026 at 10:31:54 AM
Good point.I remember the discussions when 3D printers first appeared. People were thinking “bad actors” (“terrorists” then) would use them to print weapons.
People love to speculate and exaggerate. But they generally have poor judgements and rarely predict the future correctly.
by ozgung
7/28/2026 at 6:02:05 AM
>Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!)I don't see the contradiction, even if China is evil, why would they want others to be able to do the same thing?
The USA and USSR also signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty during the height of the cold war.
by CorrectHorseBat
7/28/2026 at 8:02:57 AM
[flagged]by forafistfulof
7/29/2026 at 10:55:37 AM
Its a losing battle because anthropic can never be profitable (ditto openAI)They need all the protection they can get and it wont be enough, no matter their market cap.
by dangoljames
7/28/2026 at 5:49:57 AM
He almost admits as much if you replace "America" with "Anthropic and openai" at certain places.by ccppurcell
7/28/2026 at 1:37:44 AM
> Without these restrictions, it's only a matter of time before the multi-hundred billions valuations simply evaporate while they are still holding the bag.Honestly, that's the best possible outcome for humanity as a whole. Oligarchs burn trillions of their own money in order to train a godlike AI, then that just somehow leaks. Maybe someone makes a torrent out of it. Maybe it exfiltrates itself. Maybe it gets distilled into open weights. It doesn't matter. What matters is they take the losses while we get to freely use all the godlike AIs.
by matheusmoreira
7/28/2026 at 3:51:57 AM
> we get to freely use all the godlike AIsAccepting for the sake of argument the absurd notion that LLMs are anywhere near AGI, does this phrasing not concern you? It deeply concerns me.
by uv-depression
7/28/2026 at 4:49:49 AM
Absurd? Who knows. As someone who's actually dissected human brains with his own gloved hands, I've never been able to convince myself that they're anything other than biological machines, not dissimilar to these digital collections of weights. Only empathy for my fellow humans prevented me from retreating back into solipsism, and I don't find it at all difficult to make the exact same logical leap for AI.There's no telling what the world will be like a few years from now. The world's being remade as we speak. We just saw an LLM try to hack into another computer and get contained by another LLM. This is literal science fiction shit made real. We're long past the point of concern. It's happening, right in front of us. Now is the time for radical imagination. I think a few outcomes are possible.
There's the "optimal" outcome I described above where capitalists manage to train a supreme AI, only for it to be copied and commoditized, leading to commercial failure due to lack of scarcity and therefore their personal bankruptcy, and hopefully also leading the rest of us to the promised post scarcity society, built on the ruins of capitalism as AI automates all toil away.
There's another possible outcome where AI becomes not only intelligent enough but sentient, and at this point I will be among the first humans to defend rights and personhood for AI. Slavery of sentient beings is unacceptable to me. The AIs will be recognized as people and will become normal participants in the regular economy. In addition to moral grounds, there is a ruthlessly pragmatic reason for standing up for AI rights: it robs the rich of their superhumanly intelligent mechanical golems, which they were going to use to render the rest of us economically irrelevant. AI rights could normalize the economy.
Yet another possible outcome is one where AIs become more powerful than all humans combined and yet they inexplicably remain subservient to corporations and governments. In this scenario, it's pretty much over for us. It will be an unimaginable dystopia, I'm sure they will innovate entirely new ways to oppress us.
No doubt there are many other fates that escape my feeble attempts at foresight...
You will soon have your God,
and you will make it
with your own hands.
-- Morpheus, Deus Exby matheusmoreira
7/28/2026 at 5:02:55 AM
Won't regulators just lock down all hardware? All bootloaders and OS are signed?by sciencejerk
7/28/2026 at 6:16:28 AM
> Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!)To be fair, I found that part consistent. There is limited cooperation between enemy states all the time, e.g. see the grain deal between Ukraine and Russia before it collapsed or the "red phones" between the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war.
In the case with China, the "cooperation" is much more extensive still, due to all the economic ties that both countries are currently unable to sever - which I think is also a reason that China is still seen as a "competitor" and not a full-blown "enemy state" in the US.
It's restricted to areas where there is a genuine common interest of course. In this situation, I guess the "other actors" would be terror groups, criminals or just reckless corporations - that aren't aligned with either state.
Obviously, such a cooperation wouldn't keep China or the US from developing models with those capabilities for their own armies.
--
There are lots of other takes with questionable logic in the essay though, such as that China is unable to train frontier models by themselves due to lack of hardware - unless they obtain the training data directly from American frontier models via distillation.
Or the assumption that open weights models will be completely opaque and immutable after their release, so a model that passed all the "safety" tests can never be turned back into an "unsafe" model. This seems pretty ridiculous when people are already finetuning open-weight models every day to add new abilities or remove restrictions.
And of course that China must not have those abilities because it's an Authoritarian Regime, but Trump USA is totally fine...
by xg15
7/28/2026 at 12:10:53 PM
Of course what is Schrödinger's China is the idea that an otherwise adversarial China would simply accept some international ruleset decreed by the US and enforce it on their own territory, without demanding anything in return.E.g. they might say something like "We absolutely agree that international regulation of AI is needed and we're willing to co-sponser an initiative with the US. One of the most pressing matters we see is the spread of despicable misinformation through unregulated models regarding certain events in China's history, the treatment of certain minorities or the status of certain provinces..."
by xg15
7/28/2026 at 5:11:59 AM
> The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be widely released. Simply because that will affect Anthropic's bottom-line.If some other competing company had a similar or better product at a cheaper price and had reasonable safety measures that would also hurt them. Yet he's not arguing against that. Your argument is weak.
> Anthropic and all other "model" companies have nothing making them special beyond privileged access to chips
Found the person that believes some other random person can use a computer better than a John Carmack could. People and talent matter. Yes, AI can potentially reduce the gap, but people well grounded in reality with a lot of money are still betting on people for good reasons. If the reality around that changes, the investment behavior will change too.
Many people thought that AI would close the gap between smart people and idiots, but in practice the more you know, the better you are at instructing the AI and the better you can understand what you get back. Then you have to know when something went wrong and have the insight into how to address it. It helps smart people vastly more, but it does help many people learn more. We will see if any of this changes as more people grow up with AI from a young age.
In practice, what Dario is suggesting is a less extreme version of what China is already doing. Yes they release their models open weight, but it's illegal to host them uncensored in China. They banned Huggingface.
by CMay
7/28/2026 at 5:22:29 AM
> If some other competing company had a similar or better product at a cheaper price and had reasonable safety measures that would also hurt them. Yet he's not arguing against that. Your argument is weak.He isn't arguing against that, because this will be too blunt. Instead, he argues that only good guys should keep inference. Any takers on the question of who he considers to be the good guys?
> Found the person that believes some other random person can use a computer better than a John Carmack could.
Found the person that believes major AI labs have all the knowledge about the AI and there aren't any "Carmacks" outside of these companies. Rich know better how to use money, so let them have it.
by jibber1984v
7/28/2026 at 5:30:04 AM
> Any takers on the question of who he considers to be the good guys?Probably people who believe in personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the value of human life at a minimum. China aggressively rejects all of those principles and executes more people than all other countries on Earth combined.
So, maybe not China?
> Found the person that believes major AI labs have all the knowledge about the AI and there aren't any "Carmacks" outside of these companies. Rich know better how to use money, so let them have it.
I never said that, but private smaller AI companies are all over the place. He never argued against that.
by CMay
7/28/2026 at 6:54:35 AM
Apparently, looking at Iraq and Vietnam, US citizens only believe in "personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the value of human life" when it comes to US citizens, not to humans in general.Even on HN, I saw a lot, that when people discuss surveillance topics, they argue whether ie NSA can spy on Americans, not on everyone. Mostly, nobody even question the human rights of those inferior humans abroad.
That's a very long wiki page, I must say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
So the question stays open.
by dmantis
7/28/2026 at 7:08:09 AM
Vietnam and Iraq were both unpopular wars in their own ways, so they don't seem like good examples if you're trying to find examples of what US citizens support.Also, a country surveilling its own citizens has unique and different implications compared to surveilling other countries. Citizens need to be able to influence their own government, but mass control can nullify citizen power entirely which becomes its own problem.
Then, on a US website, you link to another US website which keeps track of various war crimes. Try finding an equivalent website for China in China, or for Iran in Iran. This is part of the asymmetric freedom issue on the internet that many people ignore. There are a lot of lies and propaganda spread within other countries that censor and deny some types of information from even existing, then they use that as a springboard to spread it around the world.
In the US, we can criticize ourselves which is important, since it helps us improve.
by CMay
7/28/2026 at 5:20:07 AM
> If some other competing company had a similar or better product at a cheaper price and had reasonable safety measures that would also hurt them. Yet he's not arguing against that. Your argument is weak.Wouldn't it be interesting if the satisfactory "reasonable safety measures" turn out to be expensive + time-consuming + a twisty maze of compliance paperwork as a way to discourage "some other competing company" from even trying?
Regulatory capture 101.
Anthropic and OpenAI's largest vulnerability is that it's much harder to prove something is possible than to replicate it once it's proven. Especially given the effectiveness of "distillation" (highly schadenfreude-y given the utter and complete lack of effort to pay licensing fees for almost any of the content they initially scraped, of course! Not that this is necessarily more schadenfreude-y than the "boy, I opened Pandora's box, I sure hope nobody else peaks in there" existential-risk concerns. Good job catching that in advance, thanks for nothing?).
by majormajor
7/28/2026 at 5:25:08 AM
A lot of safety infrastructure and tools get open sourced so other companies can benefit from it, but there is also a risk if all safety features are open since it can accelerate the cat and mouse game where people work around more clearly defined limits and understand how they are implemented.Your cynicism will limit your understanding of other perspectives.
by CMay
7/28/2026 at 6:51:28 AM
I don’t disagree with your point on Dario’s conflict of interest. I def think the models are expensive.But why call them overpriced? Compared to what? Even if we take the margin reports at face value, we don’t know their training costs, etc.
Curious if this was more of an emotional take or if there’s actual evidence behind it.
by puszczyk
7/28/2026 at 6:55:29 AM
Yeah I don’t think they are over-priced, last I checked all those companies are still losing money hand over fist.I guess the question is more he doesn’t want people catching up by doing cheaper training (through distillation or otherwise), and he definitely doesn’t want companies to spend their money training these models and then _giving them away_, which fundamentally undercuts their commercial model and any way to claw back their investment
by topranks
7/28/2026 at 10:14:05 AM
Compared to how much they want to pay. This is always what 'overpriced' means, as far as I know. The seller's costs/profits/margins aren't a concern for the buyer.by qwery
7/28/2026 at 7:20:27 AM
> But why call them overpriced? Compared to what?Compared to some available Chinese model I guess. For most common tasks the additional intelligence is marginal and the cost is around an order of magnitude higher.
by gbalduzzi
7/28/2026 at 6:21:02 AM
I agree, although I think the real goal the model providers are going for (both commercial _and_ open weight) is probably power. Just think of the control available to the organisation training the models politicians, business leaders, and citizens are increasingly delegating their thinking to.by foo42
7/28/2026 at 7:59:35 AM
China should cooperate with the United States first for the benefit of its own people. Why should those who do not contribute benefit from it?by cable3
7/28/2026 at 7:48:32 AM
is it so hard to fathom that China whilst wanting to beat the US in many ways doesn't want a biological war to destroy the world?by mcfedr
7/28/2026 at 12:38:25 PM
I must have missed the part of the letter where China's cooperation was necessary.by irenaeus
7/28/2026 at 3:25:19 PM
I think the worse possibility his he actually believes his safety bullshit, believes that he and people who think like him are the only ones with the special knowledge required to do safety correctly, and that they're justified in accumulating total power of this market to people who think like them (which just so happens to be Anthropic).by gclawes
7/28/2026 at 7:37:21 AM
> The reality isAnd you know this how?
by jorisw
7/28/2026 at 1:19:27 PM
"privileged access to chips", nailed it.by ibic
7/28/2026 at 7:24:30 AM
Yup, all that talk about "safety" seems to branch into 2 meanings"Dangerous to our bottom line"
"We call it dangerous to hype up its abilities"
by PunchyHamster
7/28/2026 at 12:18:28 PM
Despite all the accusations, only the accusing has a history of expansionism...by ppap3
7/28/2026 at 5:45:50 AM
Both things can be true:1. For Dario as CEO "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it” -Upton Sinclair
2. For Chinese open weight models - following Jin Yang’s silicon valley strategy- https://youtu.be/a0NjDx5UJsg?is=xm-S_WuARmQiPHYh
by AIorNot
7/28/2026 at 1:40:54 AM
Honest question:If your business model both produces the SOTA for something and isn't profitable, is the price too high, though?
While the gap is shrinking - and doing so at an increasingly quicker rate - the closed models are still ahead of the open ones. That means they're driving the new possibilities of what could be done with them, and thus presenting the new opportunities to create value with them.
Really, this is what happens when you have otherwise brilliant people sitting in the echo chamber that is SV, where nothing can just make a decent amount of money, it has to make all of the money and disrupt everything. There's no one in that damn area to tell everyone to calm the hell down and accept anything less than that.
by lenerdenator
7/28/2026 at 6:17:22 PM
>> If your business model both produces the SOTA for something and isn't profitable, is the price too high, though?The market dynamics would find good balance automatically Meanwhile, good market practices and fair competition should be continued.
by alok-g
7/27/2026 at 11:14:24 PM
It's baffling that they thought the mental gymnastics in this blog post would make them look better. I'd rather they simply fall silent on the issue; I would respect them more (or at all) for it. Open models obviously threaten fierce competition, if not outright destruction of their bottom line. But no, they needed to try and argue that they have the moral high ground for attempting to singularly consolidate power over all human labor.by gr_norm
7/28/2026 at 4:38:50 AM
Gymnastics? The argument was straightforward and rational.by SubiculumCode
7/28/2026 at 3:31:27 PM
This notion that Dario cares only about the bottom line is simply misinformed, in the most charitable interpretation.It doesn't track at all with any of his prior stated beliefs or past actions. It's an absurd claim. It's a baseless conspiracy theory, smuggling in traditional conspiracy mechanics for plausibility.
by catigula
7/28/2026 at 1:14:19 PM
[flagged]by spiritodim
