Posted by _tk_ 5 days ago
Most notably, any default assumption one might have had that the Trump administration can be counted upon to act in good faith should be viewed at this point as completely false. Even conservative legal scholars like Richard Epstein are shocked at the bad faith conduct across many areas.
This is a government making an authoritarian move to sabotage one of the top US AI companies. It's pure sabotage, nothing else.
If the price for tulips had falling back to something reasonable in week two, or if the US markets had had a decent correction in '97, everyone but the wild speculators would have been better off.
This TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/15/the-us-governments-anthrop...) article is a typical example of something to completely ignore and trash, the picture is the US president doing a weird face which means it's not even here to inform you, it's clearly rage-bait, not professional and incompetent obviously, I'm not from the US and when I see this, it makes me feel that those journalists are really pathetic and anyone following journalists that do so probably don't have much discernment in life.
My personal opinion is that it makes sense so the US remain a superpower by forcing tech businesses and research to move/re-incorporate to the US so practically anything "new" will always be US Made. If we assume that better models means more revenues for any company in the future, then US will always have an edge if they lock everything down, but it's a risky bet.
It's difficult to see how this motivates AI companies to relocate to the US, since US companies are the ones subject to bans.
* "better models" will remain so signficantly more profitable for firms that have access to them that that they're effectively a "must have" for big orgs, rather than a grossly overpriced marginal gain
* said better models will only be attainable by orgs in US jurisdiction, rather than by foreign alternatives that come to be either independently or through a legally clever "cleaving" of a US-jurisdiction business interest that wants access to an eager international market
If either of those are wrong, restricting Anthropic et al to only sell to the domestic market is effectively a poison pill that makes it much harder for them to meet growth and profitability objectives and could see them lose their market-leading position sooner and more thoroughly than if they retained access to a larger market and had more flexibility.
a) is specifically the risk that the export controls push companies in other countries to prefer non-US models due to the lowered risk of getting cut off from a model. The increase in revenue for non-US AI providers combined with the drop in revenue for US AI providers allows non-US providers to double down on training and reach parity or exceed US SOTA models.
b) is sort of self-explanatory. Same model as above, but when the US AI providers start seeing the revenue drop they decide to relocate internationally instead. The US would probably try to stop that, no idea how successful they would be.
But then the foreign competitor would stop the proliferation of their model and we would just go back and forth - American companies could "release" their model and after time gain the advantage back using the same tactics that the foreign competitor used.
> b) pushing the underlying companies hard enough that they decide to relocate.
This sounds like a reasonable risk to identify, but I would just say that it's not super clear-cut where you would relocate to.
I suspect that this is true for any nation with sufficient AI capabilities.
Trump and co are not playing 4D chess. It looks more and more like 1D checkers.
Musk's hosting stuff for Anthropic, too. Still competing with them. Samsung makes stuff for Apple and Android devices. Lots of this in the industry.
The CEO of Amazon is not a neutral actor in this scenario.