alt Hacker NewsThat's not why.
We've entered a pretty adversarial era, and we know there are unexpected attack vectors available in frontier models. Just because you an inspect the weights doesn't mean you can derive the behavior.
I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
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If that's truly your concern you should ban like 90% of anything containing any kind of electronic device because they're all either made in or transit via China at some point
who is we? are you working for the government? this fucking obsession you people having with 'fighting the adversary' is ridiculous
If the CCP was so advanced that they can implement these attacks in models released as .safetensors, I would assume that the government can pay multiple western frontier labs can show how and where this is done and publish it for anyone to reproduce in a sandbox.
In reality, the attack is much simpler: flood the market with genuine competition so that neutral parties (and their own corporations and that of their allies and potential allies) never have to be enslaved by the US corporations and hence they cannot be forced to join the US in sanctioning China.
This is much less risky as a strategy (imagine how bad getting caught doing the other thing would be) and works way better.
> I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
I'm pretty sure they do, at least officially. But obviously the distillation and API proxies used by Chinese uses are unofficially tolerated and even exploited.
> That's not why.
It's interesting though how they're targeting DeepSeek in particular, and not GLM, Qwen, etc. Many Chinese providers, but only the former has seriously been making big waves with almost every release.