alt Hacker NewsFrom PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone
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There's no effective way of enforcing export controls on local software like PGP etc. Whatever they say someone will leak it.
It is possible to shutdown access to hosted services, as happened with Fable, but it can't really be done selectively. The US government wanted to allow it for US nationals only but Anthropic couldn't do that and so shut it down for everyone. Even if they did tie Claude accounts to nationality some people would set up "proxy servers" to allow access (either for montetary gain or because they don't agree with the restrictions)
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Brutal own goaling by the USA. I'm glad it happened, but the USA had a golden opportunity to subsidize domestic providers for 10 years and lease to China to discourage competition and side innovation.
DeepSeek and Qwen would have been neat parlor tricks, never developed further because the US subsidized mega models would have been too cheap and reliable to make them necessary.
Nope! USA played its hand and forced the world to have to account for its USA exposure risk and deversify. A serious one time use strategic advantage pissed away.
Doesnt really bother me personally per se; but armchair quarterbacking the USA's decisions seem Suboptimal...
The article and most HN comments here understandably talk about failed export control when the target audience is individual users. But export controls are actually fairly successful when their target is employees within a company. Go to an AI hardware company like Nvidia (or even Google which builds TPUs), and you’ll find that specific internal projects involve export controlled knowledge and can only be staffed by U.S. citizens, not foreigners. And employees naturally take this seriously without circumvention attempts because their job is on the line. This is the kind of quiet export control that stopped plenty of people successfully, but it’s just not visible to the world.
Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance.
Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung and SK Hynix, but their next generation 950 series (fabbed by SMIC) will use memory (fabbed by CXMT), not using the HBM standard, but by necessity their own HiBL and HiZQ standards.
HBM depends on ever wider memory bus widths to increase bandwidth, which in turn depends on SOTA TSMC manufacturing nodes for bus density. Huawei found a different way, using their LinqQu interconnect/switching tech to aggregate the bandwidth of individually slower memory chips resulting in an aggregate 4TB/sec bandwidth on par with HBM3e.
Trump has blocked Fable for export, but China (Ziphu) already has GLM-5.2 knocking on the door of the US frontier models, despite being developed with one hand tied behind their back. GLM-5.1 had only scored 18% on DeepSWE, but GLM-5.2 coming 11 weeks later, scores 48%, about on par with GPT 5.5. What's next ?!
Exept PGP could run on freely available hardware. What makes Mythos vulnerable is the centralization and scale of compute required and its proprietary nature.
History shows that export controls fail on knowledge, but are damn effective on commercial products.
Before countries worry about tech they need to address fresh water, homelessness, and filth. Look at India and china, for example.
These controls are impossible to enforce. Users find ways around, compliant businesses lose.
> Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also reportedly alerted the administration after Amazon’s own researchers, he said, found a way around Fable 5’s safeguards. Anthropic disputes the “jailbreak” label
Doing god’s work there, Andy, thanks /s
Wonder what Anthropic internal messages look like about his move. Does Anthropic have a meme slack channel?
It's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice.
The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own. So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues, etc. Of course, there will be US-based actors willing to resell access, just like there are US-based actors willing to re-ship export-controlled hardware to Iran. And they will probably keep getting arrested every now and then.
The thing that's silly about this situation isn't that export controls on technology can't work, it's that it's overhyped technology and that Anthropic painted themselves into that corner by pretending it's as dangerous as nukes. Add to this a mercurial and petty administration and you have a pretty predictable outcome.