Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring

Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba

Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting

Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring.

Tencent gaming: restricted youth gaming froze approvals

NetEase and gaming companies: licence freeze stopped game companies from shipping games.

Meituan: fined Meituan and forced changes to its labour and platform model.

Huya/DouYu: blocked Tencent’s game-streaming merger, stopping commercial consolidation in a major entertainment market.

Boss Zhipin / Full Truck Alliance: froze new users after listging in the US

Crypto companbies: banned crypto trading and mining, forcing exchanges offshore.

Think it's not happening to the US?

tourism - people afraid to visit

tariffs - wrecking ball to all businesses

defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

internet clouds - Greenland made Europe decide that the US clouds can't be trusted, now sovereign computing matters and MS/AWS/Google are feeling it

finance - no one trusts the US not to turn people into "non members of global society" by banning them from visa and credit card and banking systems

"wait, not like that"

I'm very pro-west, but at this point okay, I guess the rest of us have to side with China, not because we remotely like it, but because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.

If non US citizens shouldn't have the models - wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?

IMO AI is different from everything else. It is a weapon as potent as nuclear. It is only natural that it be treated as one.

If they can’t freely sell access to their models and Chinese models catch up to Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 in 6-8 months - then why pay OAI/Anthropic at all?

- instant, total world war if it's not coming from USA

- let's finish all oil's reserve first otherwise

In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over the sovereignty.

The US gov sees these AI companies as bartering power, not as innovation. Wouldn’t you as a parent always want what’s best for your child, not for yourself?

It also feels like they can’t just relocate out of the country, as the administration will surely sanction anyone from business within the country again. These firms are so over inflated with evaluations and opex, they’ve dug themselves into a corner.

This is not to say regulation does not exist in any other country, but it’s clear now after what’s happening at Anthropic + OAI that the US gov has taken these companies hostage.

This is only further playing into the hands of open source and the outside models; the US gov is going to be to blame for when they all lose the race to low cost/free.

I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me.

Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?

Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.

I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.