Hopefully open source AI is more important to the Chinese government than just an economic attack that they are willing to stop given some economic incentives by the US. Like maybe it helps all the Chinese labs keep a higher AI capability baseline with the shared research and model weights. I suppose we’ll have to see. An agreement to stop open source probably wouldn’t be publicly mentioned because of how unpopular it would be with the tech industry, so we’ll only know if it happened if the Chinese labs stop releasing open weight models over the next several months.

“Non-state actors” = you and me.

There it is. The US is pressuring China to stop open sourcing their AI models and in return get some Nvidia chips. The US government wants you to have to rent your AI from centralized, tightly controlled US corporations. Scott Bessent: “The two AI superpowers are going to start talking. We're going to set up a protocol in terms of how do we go forward with best practices for AI to make sure nonstate actors don't get a hold of these models," https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/14/us-china-ai-rules-bessent-us-lead.html

I hope the US delegation gets told to pound sand when it asks the Chinese to stop open sourcing their best AI models during their meeting this week.

Yes, the current latest generation of closed AI models like Mythos and GPT 5.5-Cyber are already being held back from public release. Only the government and a few corporations get to have them. Once there is an open source equivalent, most likely from China, the response from the US will be interesting. An outright ban is unenforceable, but banning US hosting providers from serving it is something i saw proposed. Doing that will have the effect of encouraging more people and companies to self-host the AI rather than renting it from the cloud though - they will end up spreading it more with their restrictions!

Probably either the next or the one after next generation of open source AI models will be the one where the US government tells us we can’t have it. Should be interesting.

I’ve seen evidence that unified memory computers like Apple Studio and AMD Strix Halo can be clustered with RDMA over Ethernet to achieve usable tokens per second, like ~15 t/s with fairly large models. Of course these clusters are not cheap for most consumers especially at today’s hardware prices. I think once “the bubble pops” we will see a lot more interesting developments for locally hosting larger LLMs, like decommissioned servers ending up on eBay and just generally lower hardware costs for DIY AI clusters.

It will be nice if open source alternatives keep up in capability.

Anthropic has begun KYCing for access to Claude. It’s vital that open source AI keeps up in capability to provide a viable alternative to this. https://startupfortune.com/anthropics-new-id-and-facial-scan-requirement-for-claude-is-pushing-privacy-conscious-users-toward-local-ai-models/

I won’t use any OS or app with state-mandated malware for my daily driver. As for websites that don’t work without handshaking with the malware, I’ll do what I can with existing alternatives and maybe have a secondary minimal compliance device like an iPhone for the invasive sites I absolutely need to access. https://linuxiac.com/federal-bill-would-bring-os-level-age-verification-to-the-entire-us/