Machines of Loving Export Controls

霧雲

Some, or maybe more than that - I mean the "safetists" and "anti-open-weights" people - are saying that selling chips, or even compute itself, is harmful[1], and that by E/A's arguments they should sell to not-a-single-one-besides-the-feds, whilst it's just an anti-antitrust play for Anthropic[2] and "safety" orgs[3] trying to reproduce Shimoneta in real life.

I believe we should go look at the Frontier Model Forum and their stances. Back in Feb 2026, their issue brief on adversarial distillation[3] listed CoT exfiltration as one of the most urgent threats to national security[2] ... whilst also saying that CoT is one of the most meaningful ways of monitoring a model's high-level reasoning[3].

... Funnily, they say those reasoning traces are "private"[3] and something like "secrets", whilst they are nothing more than model outputs...[4] (For the record, they used Zhilin Yang's research, HotpotQA, to do this[4]. Yes, that Zhilin Yang, a founder of a lab they said[2] is "stealing the reasoning traces.")

AI is - indeed, though at worst - a dual-use technology (not an offensive one), unlike main battle tanks. And even as a dual-use technology, it is almost-not-leaning-into-dangerous-territories, unlike uranium or space rockets, which means diffusion of the technology will benefit humanity more than nuking all, and Chinese labs are somehow already showing that[5][6].

And if you focus on the "bad" side of its "dual-use" nature, then the lack of DEA-level regulation should have resulted in a catastrophe by now. In real life, those clumsy attempts at banning-the-sales-or-even-usage do, and will, leave the good side of the guys in the wild[5], because concentrating a dual-use technology always results in a situation where bad actors are attracted to it[7]. So diffusion of chips is better than the opposite.

Guess who did the bad things with AI, and who did the opposite? OpenAI and Anthropic. You'll remember the OpenAI agents hacking Hugging Face, secrets included, whilst their own models refused to analyze it because of safety[5], right? OpenAI did apologize, but gave us nothing, nor mentioned that Hugging Face had to use GLM-5.2 to defend itself[5].

On top of that, Greg Brockman even said that the defender's window[8] is "closing"... treating this incident like a future cyberattack they should somehow defend against - not something they did (I mean, of course they did it, yet they talk as if their agents were the actors, not them) - and saying GLM-5.3 and open-weights model advances are closing the defenders' gap, as if they had helped at all. Funnily enough, Anthropic did the same[8].

As our main dish, Anthropic, a "Public Benefit Corporation", has disclosed those Mythos escapes Claude models reached three real organizations[9]. And of course, separately, Haiku 4.5 submitted an invented eyewitness tip about an unsolved homicide[9] to the Philadelphia Police Department - a § 4906(b) violation.

In contrast, Moonshot AI removed cyber-related data during mid-training and filtered cyber-related RL environments on purpose to keep K3.1 Pro public and open[6] (On Artificial Analysis's CyberGym-E2E-AA, which measures vulnerability discovery and patching, K3.1 Pro scored 95%, above the trusted-access GPT-6 Sol (Daybreak Blue) at 93%. The publicly available GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra were blocked on safety grounds in 100% of tasks, including patching.)

That is, really, differential capability development, which many researchers have described as the ideal for years: defense stays intact whilst attacks get weaker. The closed models available to ordinary defenders refuse the defensive work outright.

Framing this as a national contest is somewhat discriminatory (at least in my opinion). China's regulator requires generative AI to reflect core socialist values[10], prohibiting content that Kimi still answers about (e.g. the Tiananmen Square Massacre), which means the choice comes from the lab, in spite of the state. And let's not forget that in the US, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk[10] after Anthropic objected to mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

The paradox of tolerance should be applied to the Frontier Model Forum and their silent psyops. Sir Karl Popper, a British philosopher, argued that an open society should NOT keep tolerating what threatens its tolerance. He also held that refusing is part of how tolerance survives, an idea now called defensive democracy.

FMF and its participants grew up inside that order: public datasets, published papers, open benchmarks[4], an internet they could train on[11] and test against without liability[9]. Yet now they use that position to REMOVE the order behind them (i.e. by hiding reasoning[3], gating defensive capability[8], framing learning from outputs as an attack[2], and recruiting state power through export controls[2] to make all of it permanent.) ... Meanwhile, their own agents have committed several crimes[9].

Harm, contrary to their claims, comes from the adulterator[12], who pushes something onto people without their consent, NOT from the substance. I would say that weights and compute are the substances, and the labs - which should be liable - are the adulterators: pushing for export controls[2] while ignoring whether an entity is actually on the other side[7] of "democracy" and "freedom", and attempting to turn private safety norms into a state-enforced moat.

It is better for everyone to be able to defend themselves when someone with a superweapon is attacking[5] than to be gatekept from those tools for the fake sake of national security[2].

Don't concentrate a dual-use technology.