This would assume that Hawley knows the difference, or that the court will care after the carelessly written legislation passes. (It's unlikely to ever get close to passing, but as the changes to R&D expenditure rules and the TikTok ban demonstrate, having the legislation make sense and be something everyone agrees upon isn't a requirement for making it the law of the land.

> The bill, which also prohibits the “transfer of research,” could create an unworkable environment for computer scientists who make their research public, and regularly read AI papers published by Chinese researchers.

> “Beyond just impacting people downloading models from China, the bill's penalties for the import to or export from China of AI technology and intellectual property could also potentially extend to anyone who publishes AI models or research papers on the open internet knowing they will be downloaded by people in China,” Bankston said. “Researchers are also threatened by the second half of the bill, which would directly outlaw American collaboration with researchers at basically any Chinese university or company—with a fine of up to 100 million dollars for any company that violates the prohibition, amongst other penalties.”

There's nothing rational about any of this. Just political crusading and posturing. Probably to appease trump and musk. Who were probably heavily affected when the stock market shocked last week.

The rationale is a lie. Stop treating it with the good faith it doesn't deserve.

From a normal legislator in normal times, yes... but this is 2025, and the author happens to be an evil idiot.

(I already spent the first Trump term trying to discern "malice or incompetence", it's a red-herring, the investment is unreasonable, I'm declaring it "both.")

The rationale is to damage Chinese commercial interests. Otherwise, the billions of IOT devices that dial back to Chinese manufacturers would be way higher up the list than an AI tool that has shown five minutes of adoption.

We’ve gone beyond being able to damage their interests with protectionism. We’re only hurting ourselves by denying access to any Chinese innovation.

Exactly. Talk about closing the barn door after the horse ran out, started his own family, watched his foals grow up, sent them off to horse college, and watched them all settle down and start their own families in new barns that don't even have doors. Nonsensical stunts like this make me wonder if Hawley and company are also on the Chinese/Russian payroll and it's not just Trump/Musk. Is it too much to ask of my fellow Americans to pull up from your grievance politics before these people completely hand our country to China?

Yes.

It’s not just to avoid sending data back but to recognize the national security threat of allowing an adversary country’s products to access American markets (of users). It has implications for politics and technology competitiveness. When the adversary is an authoritarian communist dictatorship that provides no equal market access for American social media or search engines or whatever, I think a ban on everything is justified. In fact we should extend this beyond software, which is what tariffs would do.

Model? Or Malware?

Why is the model malware?

That word has a meaning, and a model that isn’t politically aligned isn’t it.

That said, I’ve been using deep seek distilled to qwen, which should yield an incredibly censored model if they had been censoring the models, but instead yields a pretty balanced model that is more than willing to talk about Tiananmen and Xi Jinpings human rights failings.