alt Hacker NewsIf the Trump administration decides to annoint Altman and Amodei in defiance of market forces it will rapidly discover that it no longer has the sovereign bond auction pricing power to prop them up. This isn't 1998: the Treasury has taken five major body blows in the last 25 years, the world's energy markets, maritime insurance regimes, electronic payments rails, and moral authority in places like the UN Security Council are effectively bifurcated. Oil and money and data and people just flow around the United States now. Canada's sovereign debt yields tank harder when the market is spooked, that's the North American flight to quality.
The administration could probably put some serious friction on open weight model use in the Fortune 500 for a little while, but the opposition never got such a gift right before a squeaker midterm. And outside of major enterprises with puckered ass compliance departments? Not a chance. It's popular around here to forget Uber and AirBnB and yes, OpenAI and Anthropic all got their start flagrantly breaking the law and grew lawyers and lobbyists faster than anyone could enforce it. And this time everyone from the DNC to the EFF would be holding hands wearing "Save The Models" t-shirts. Not even NVIDIA is remotely pretending they're anything but all in on GLM 5.2, they had an NVFP4 quant up by the time most people read the blog post.
And the Trump Administration isn't exactly enamored of Comrade Amodei at the moment, being as they're appealing the lawsuit Anthropic brought against the Pentagon during a shooting war.
Forcing the American proprietary AI megalab financing event was our fiscal Ukraine Special Military Operation, the market is calling the bluff and neither the capital markets nor the Federal Reserve has the dry powder to absorb this one.
The Treasury auctions will flat not clear in an orderly way. We can't raise 2-4 trillion dollars on a dime in 2026 and if CoreWeave turns out, as many suspect, to be Patient Zero? It would be that big a hole.
We play by the same rules as everyone else now. I hope we regard it as being worth it, but I fear we will not.
It is in OpenAI, Anthropic, and the US Gov's best interest to slow China down and ban Chinese models. Literally none of what you wrote prevents them from doing so.
Once China starts to get scary, Commerce will export control GPUs and declare Chinese models "foreign munitions." Any nation doing business with the US will not be allowed to use these models either, and that will be the end of that.
It is just not in the US's interests to fund China in the race to AGI.