Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689028

It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.

There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies.

I knew the time would come when individuals on personal subscriptions get the short end of the stick. Didn't think it would come so soon. I hope we're not too badly deprecated in the months to come.

Looks like I've got to improve my DeepSeek workflows.

This is like the battle between PostgreSQL and Oracle all over. Move up market, isolate yourself to enterprises, and watch while everyone else builds on PostgreSQL and erodes any technical advantage you had, until people just stop talking about you altogether.

There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.

LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative. Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.

But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.

The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.

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

I'm hoping this is a call to action for local AI.

moving to open weight models is trivial now, with optimizations and stuff glm 5.2 is roughly the same price as the best models around from multiple vendors.

unless I could atleast try and see Sol perform like 10x better I don't really have a reason to switch back.

I used Fable for like what 2-3 days at most and didn't really feel it was so much better, only difference was I had to prompt it less, not to get what I want but to get to a working output. Code quality was still shit, still made bad plans and analysis and so on.

- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?

- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time

- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs

- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)

- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience

- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits

So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.

Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.

The cynic in me suspects they were salivating so much over the Spacex IPO they wanted a finger in anthropics 2026 IPO. Banning fable ~1 day after.

Now OpenAI and Anthropic are big incumbents with Trillion dollar valuations at stake, so they can’t take any risks. Unlike google they don’t really have a thriving primary business to protect though, so without being able to continue to take risks and ignore regulation startup-style, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to stay relevant.

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.

/s, maybe

"wait, not like that"

If the US continues to limit advanced AI to it's own domestic companies, US companies will have a large unfair advantage over foreign competitors who will no longer able to compete.

Wouldn't it then make sense for governments around the world to start banning or tariffing US products and services to protect their industries?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696965

This will tank the market.

See you all on the other side!

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.

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

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?

I'm very glad to see them say this explicitly and prominently.

Want frontier intelligence? Better not defy the current administration, or your competitors will have access to a better model you could never use.

This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.

Otherwise they're putting US frontier labs at a huge disadvantage by preventing them from recouping costs on their biggest models.

How much more will OpenAI and Anthropic models cost when they're the only AI you can legally use?

https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/47857230937/luigi-zi...

You may have to make similar offerings if you want to use the latest version of ChatGPT.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0O9QhwIkj5w

Or, as a European, thanx for letting Mistral catch-up, I was looking for a reason to use it... A foreign gov deciding what I can use or being able to suddenly pull the plug on my tool makes it easier to choose the lesser quality. (And now I hope my own leaders won't start pulling models :p)

I am asking because I have seen a growing number of stories about organizations getting owned by either raw mismanagement of security, supply chain attacks that are often a failure at the ecosystem level, npm, etc.

I am not really seeing from what we hear about the use of AI for penetration as a threat yet. The growing problem with security seems to be more at the management and ecosystem layers.

Not many story that netfilter, ipfw or pf got owned by one of those frontier models.

A lot of stories that organisation X and Y left keys on a public repo for months.

Companies like Microsoft have been asleep at the wheel in terms of security for decades and now there's a model that can identify where they've been careless. That's not a "nuclear bomb level threat" or whatever Anthropic wants to call it, it's reckless carelessness by the existing companies.

Bad Federal regulation has a much larger blast radius.

Let’s hope Chinese models save us from this. BYD is trying to save us from Elon but 100% tariffs are welfare keeping Elon afloat.

Is there any concrete information on whether this would be an application process or perhaps for companies that meet certain criteria?

So which position should the government take? The one it’s doing? Or that LLMs aren’t actually key to national security.

The rise in capability of LLMs over the past year has basically removed a lot of these boundaries for people. Learning, building, and experimenting is a lot easier when you have a capable partner like Claude to help you along the way. Claude doesn't always get everything right, and you have to be a skeptic, but it's a lot better than nothing.

When I see the government restricting access to LLMs (or Anthropic as they were doing with Mythos before the whole Fable debacle), I basically just see the same old pattern of the ruling class moving to protect their advantage by keeping the great masses in ignorance. Broadening access to LLMs (i.e. effective knowledge) would put everyone on a more level playing field. But we can't have that, because politics, nations, the economy, blah blah reasons reasons. Guess utopia will just have to wait a bit longer.

But then again, this feels a lot like cryptography export controls. Those controls are in place, but I doubt anyone really thinks they work or make much of a difference. Software is not like nuclear weapons, and a data center is a much smaller lift than a Uranium enrichment facility. So maybe this is just a temporary roadblock. But let me tell you, I sure am ready for it to feel more like the government is working for (not against) the people.

Eg I expect I would have paid more than 2x per day what I spent the past few weeks, and if gpt 5.6 comes out and is competitive that's going to absolutely gain market share.

An unbelievably costly turn of events for them

None of them care about states rights, they just want to control things directly.

Who is deciding who gets to use GPT-5.6? Which organizations? Which leaders?

Focus on that to have a clearer conversation. Without doing this it's like jerking each other off to stroke our egos. You might as well as say "The World will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

Is this going to be like that?

My biggest quality? I am an American citizen and a trusted partner.

Worst quality? I am on a waitlist for Mythos preview

Yes I’m looking forward to tokenmaxxing together and looking forward for your answer!

It’s not really the executives job or role to create new regulatory structures. If they want something durable, that lasts more than one administration, they need actual laws passed by Congress.

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.

Whilst this policy is driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies as USA cannot be relied upon, on the plus side for OpenAI, the publicity of this will help drive customer sales.

Really glad to see some reasonably prominent pushback against this government overreach.

The information has been reporting that the government wants to individually approve which companies get access and when.

Imagine the wonderful opportunities for corruption and influence peddling, not to mention, excluding any companies that don’t support Trump

OpenAI Leans Toward Waiting Until Next Year for IPO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678873

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

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

I hope the country doesn’t become the new USSR.

Come on.

I think occam's razor can be applied here. And like everything else, its about money. I don't know exactly what the play will be here, but this doesn't sound like this technology is too powerful and more like billions of $ lost investments need to be made up somehow without the people getting annoyed about the government bailing these guys (AI companies, investors, etc.) out.

The first obvious conclusion is that China has been utterly vindicated to keep US tech giants out of China. Some have a token presence but it's clear that the Chinese government will never let a US tech government "win" in any domestic market. It will always be a Chinese company. Obligatory Silicon Valley [1].

The second is that, to that end, IMHO the US government made an error blocking the sale of high-end chips (particularly NVidia) to China. Why? Because it's created a captive market for Chinese chip manufacturing. Huawei now has billions in potential sales that might've otherwise gone to chips produced in Taiwan and South Korea.

Third, the US can somehow ban a Dutch company (ASML) from selling EUV to China. This has forced China to replicate it and they will within a few years. The interesting part of this is that all it really takes is throwing money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked for ASML. It really is using the mechanics of the Western economic system against itself.

Last, the US government will try and make US tech giants "own" or "win" AI. And they will fail because the Chinese government will make sure they fail. How? By releasing ever-better open models for free. I believe China considers this a matter of national security to not be beholden to US tech giants (and thus the US government).

The ironic thing to me is that the US is doing what the West accuses China of doing with corporate control. I'd say the actual difference is that Chinese companies are beholden to the state whereas the US government is basically 5 companies in a trenchcoat. The US wants to mint trillionaires at the expense of literally everybody else. China believes society should benefit from something they collectively make possible.

Anyway, we've been here before. Remember the crypto export ban of the 1990s and 2000s? Did that prevent higher-quality encryption from being used overseas? No. This won't help either.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5XQxRrQvw

This is rich social classes claiming more for themselves.

Someone convince me otherwise?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-book-bu...

How do I know? Dario Amodei said that when he explained why Anthropic has to limit the US Government's usage of its models [1]:

  > Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases [...]: Mass domestic surveillance. Fully autonomous weapons. 

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

Thank you Chinese Robin Hoods

i had one place, they were using all these shady pay with a credit card for "points" to do these web gui things that were... basically nmap, dig, etc?

so i wrote up a small shell script that took in the servers our (often nonprofit) clients wanted scanned...

and so we could lower our costs and free up analyst time -- but sadly they often found out they had out of date windows boxen they couldn't afford to fix, and we'd have to settle for getting them onto MFA, using password managers and basics like that.

people overvalue AI imho. people are getting weak, they don't teach themselves the concepts that would allow them to make best use of AI.

anyways, i think the type of person freaking out is the same who's been cutting and pasting from stack overflow rather than learning enough to grab a book or read up on a library to get the needful done.

but hey, what do i know? i'm just some freak on hacker news

(proudly writing w/o AI :-))

I have always wondered how AI industry is not in a (partial) bubble because open weight models will substantially eat into their revenue (rather sooner than later). But with this ('bro') regulation it seems that an easy strategy could be to regulate this problem away, especially easy to convince everyone that those chines models are truly evil.

What disturbs me is that this was not extremely obvious and predictable to everyone else. I have been called schizophrenic for my views on AI, here, and I kind of see how some could miss my points, but I am genuinely perplexed by the views on the subject I see around here, or specifically the views I don't see here.

Did anyone really not see this coming long ago? I have year-old transcripts discussing exactly what's happening with AI and government intervention. I even have a time-stamped transcript with Sonnet 12 hours prior, soft-predicting the shutdown of Fable. What is not clear about this?

* with big pockets

Arent these the same clowns who keep saying that the government needs to regulate AI to protect society [from their competitors] or whatever? And im not just talking about back when they used to be a nonprofit, Altman was still using that line post-sellout too.

GLM on LLM Asics is going to be amazing, US hosted or otherwise

It's not about the tech. We have a corrupt administration gatekeeping two powerful models for companies set to go public soon.

I bet the models are powerful.

I also bet there is a lot of money being exchanged, too, for keeping the bubble big, so certain people will profit.

Trump doesn't care about the people. He cares about himself.

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.

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 ?

USA RIP.

Approval lists for AI models.

Two sides of the same coin. The administration is taking the opportunity now on the back of fear mongering done by the labs. The labs get regulatory lock-in, the govt gets surveillance. Everybody (that matters) wins.

My company is very interested in local LLMs even just to cut back on codex spend. I imagine a lot of other businesses are, too. With the recent developments in open weight models, it seems like it's only a matter of time before they're frontier level, and any added delay in OpenAI and Anthropic models being publicly available is just more reason for businesses and individuals to try them out.

Just like the Iran war accelerating fossil fuel abandonment, this administration can't even do the wrong thing without fucking it up. I say we take this win.

[dupe] Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678789

It's a matter of time before the Chinese models are banned.

Or are we going to play the whole "you guys suck... but I'll keep using your product" game?

These models aren't even that smart and they are already trying to control them and lock them down to a handful of people.

Then these executive and VC wonder why people hate AI and are against them.

Because the future is heading toward intelligence for the rich and you stuck with whatever model they want you to have.

The next step is banning open source models.

The future is not looking so bright if these models are already going locked down to whoever the government what's to have them.

This is no different than the government banning books because they don't want you to learn.

We obviously can't A/B test this... but if Dario hadn't been doing that, would any of this been happening right now?

Censorship. Surveillance. (Hi, PLTR!)

But if the government can simply ban models from the market? especially given how much the admin loves the idea of Tariffs? Knowing Trump the chance of this happening is 99.9%

We will all be stuck paying $50/mtok to Anthropic (And by we I mean only Big Tech will be able to afford tokens). The rest of the competition will be outcompeted by super intelligent machines. And AI CO’s /Big Tech will take over the economy.

I’m quite confident that few people are more ignorant on AI than Donald Trump. That he promised less regulation and lied is no different than his many other lies.

In six months everyone will cancel frontier subscriptions.

We are very clearly proceeding down the road to a dystopia here.

i see opensource model is big win for me.

My brother in Christ, then why did you (and your competitors) spend years telling the government you needed them to tie your hands behind your back? Did you really think they'd just give you a crown that says "Gatekeeper Of All Neural Networks"?

The way you know this is true is to imagine The Others in power. Sacks used to scream about government interference, but now that he's running (this part of) the government, obviously things are different.

The only constant is that David Sacks (& co) always believed he should have all the power.