RetroFed
Bessent says U.S. could sanction China over AI model ‘theft’
submitted by
eickerhttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/bessent-china-ai-sanctions.html
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So, pirates protecting their hoard of stolen goods from other pirates using money they pilfered from their own crew. What a time to be alive.
Absolutely! 💯
Funny how AI suddenly becomes sacred intellectual property only when someone else catches up. If the evidence is real, enforce the rules. If it is not, this risks looking less like protecting innovation and more like protecting market leaders from uncomfortable competition.
Ai is viewed as a national strategic resource. Laws/lax regulations which favour American ai growth will be encouraged, any serious competition, especially from a true geopolitical rival, will be blocked as best as possible (e.g., all of America’s chip export restrictions on China.)
That being said, Bessent probably won’t do a damn thing. America just publicly lost a trade war w China and is now losing an actual war. I could still see trump’s belligerent ass trying something but I’d giggle with anticipation about how he’d have to walk it back within the week.
Edit: first word It to Ai.
Both Washington and Beijing now treat AI less like software and more like oil or nuclear technology. Once that happens, export controls are almost inevitable. The real question is whether open weight AI make those controls increasingly irrelevant over time.
Open wait AI? No. Open source AI? Yes.
Open weight AI only allows you to tune the parameters and run it locally, where open source AI also gives you the training data and stuff that was used to make the model itself.
That distinction is totally correct in principle, but in practice almost no frontier model releases its training data because of licensing, privacy, and sheer scale. Today, Open Weight AI has become the common compromise: useful for research and local use, even if it falls well short of the traditional open source definition.
Look at OLMO from AI2
There are lots of awesome OSAI! But today, they are completely outperformed by OWAI and closed AI. My guess: that won’t change in future.
Thieves calling other thieves thieves … like black pots and kettles.
At least in this case, they actually know what they’re talking about. ✅
There is no evidence of “theft"/distillation by latest models. Anthropic’s original allegations were weak against deepseek. When someone publishes vibe code to github, it’s not theft from the LLM to train on it. Repeating loser whinning often enough to make it US dogma, doesn’t make it truth. China is a short fuse away from sinking US fleet blockading Iran.
Also Cursor (recently bought by spacex for $60B) “stole” not only the entirety of kimi 2.5, but all of their users data to train its composer models ontop of kimi 2.5.
haven’t they already tried sanctioning china? i remember it didn’t go well
Are you still hoping that he’ll learn at some point?
Sanctioning our trade partner who is already feeling it from the oil crisis. Thats using your noggin.
China would respond by moving on Taiwan or imposing trade restrictions.
Competition?? Under capitalism?? Disgusting!!!
Spider-Man.meme