They didn’t tell them to pull it, they told them to revoke access from non-US nationals. Similar to export control rules for cryptography that have existed for a long time. PGP got its author a criminal investigation back in the day.
Now Anthropic can’t guarantee a restriction to US nationals so Anthropic pulled it instead.
They probably have some internal problems with this too. They just hired Andrej Karpathy (one of the founders of OpenAI) - he’s a Greencard holder but not a US national.
You can be mad anyway of course, but maybe more in the context of a government stake in OpenAI being discussed recently and the conflict of interest this brings. Export control by itself isn’t new though.
And, as the post points out, it was an impossible demand. So it’s functionally the same.
And it’s not the same as export control. I’m old enough to remember encryption export control. There was no prohibition on non-citizens in US territory from using any encryption level they wanted for domestic use. Half the emails and Usenet posts I got back then were by non-citizens residing in the US and using PGP with RSA above the limit.
Export control as a concept isn’t new, but this a very new application of it. The ban seems to apply to all non-US citizens for a whole product version, not only one aspect of that product, or potentially even other versions of the same product.
The ban is also unlike cryptography in that this wasn’t a military tech with regulatory controls that began to be adopted by companies who knew there were restrictions. This is the reverse, a ban applied to a pre-existing application where there were notoriously no controls in place.
Anthropic has multiple offices internationally, so even if we put Karpathy aside for a moment, it would be an unbelievably complex task to silo off internal access and work allocation. It’s not like it’s a Netscape situation where they have to make sure the few people working with the RSA algorithm details are US citizens, and they have to ship a slightly nerfed fork alongside the US version, for a product that works entirely on a local single machine.
I’m certainly not angered by the situation, but it’s very clearly market manipulation with nonsensical justification, and far wider implications than just for Anthropic.
They didn’t tell them to pull it, they told them to revoke access from non-US nationals. Similar to export control rules for cryptography that have existed for a long time. PGP got its author a criminal investigation back in the day.
Now Anthropic can’t guarantee a restriction to US nationals so Anthropic pulled it instead.
They probably have some internal problems with this too. They just hired Andrej Karpathy (one of the founders of OpenAI) - he’s a Greencard holder but not a US national.
You can be mad anyway of course, but maybe more in the context of a government stake in OpenAI being discussed recently and the conflict of interest this brings. Export control by itself isn’t new though.
And, as the post points out, it was an impossible demand. So it’s functionally the same.
And it’s not the same as export control. I’m old enough to remember encryption export control. There was no prohibition on non-citizens in US territory from using any encryption level they wanted for domestic use. Half the emails and Usenet posts I got back then were by non-citizens residing in the US and using PGP with RSA above the limit.
Export control as a concept isn’t new, but this a very new application of it. The ban seems to apply to all non-US citizens for a whole product version, not only one aspect of that product, or potentially even other versions of the same product.
The ban is also unlike cryptography in that this wasn’t a military tech with regulatory controls that began to be adopted by companies who knew there were restrictions. This is the reverse, a ban applied to a pre-existing application where there were notoriously no controls in place.
Anthropic has multiple offices internationally, so even if we put Karpathy aside for a moment, it would be an unbelievably complex task to silo off internal access and work allocation. It’s not like it’s a Netscape situation where they have to make sure the few people working with the RSA algorithm details are US citizens, and they have to ship a slightly nerfed fork alongside the US version, for a product that works entirely on a local single machine.
I’m certainly not angered by the situation, but it’s very clearly market manipulation with nonsensical justification, and far wider implications than just for Anthropic.