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- byzantinegenehttps://www.mofcom.gov.cn/xwfb/xwfyrth/art/2026/art_d7661dbf..."Second, we encourage open source, open collaboration, and resource sharing. The Chinese government is committed to making artificial intelligence a significant driving force for promoting common prosperity and safeguarding common security. To support the construction of an open source innovation ecosystem for artificial intelligence, convenient measures such as automatic licensing will be applied to technology exports involving open source AI technologies, Chinese companies building and operating their own computing centers overseas, conducting chip fabrication overseas, utilizing overseas resources for joint research and development, and participating in the formulation of international standards, basically achieving "immediate reporting and export." Technologies that have already entered the public domain through open source or published academic papers will not be included in the export management scope, creating a favorable environment for international exchange and cooperation in artificial intelligence technology."their official stance suggests they remain in support of open-weights
- _fwI understand why China wants to restrict exports of their models.But I feel the only reason Chinese models have been able to gain such popularity is BECAUSE they are open source.I wouldn’t trust models from China enough to use them in important work unless they were open.Restricting any powerful Chinese model [that ranks in the global top 10] is going to make them very difficult to advocate for, and very hard for global users to adopt.Feels like this could be the beginning of the end of the democratisation of powerful AI.And yes, I appreciate the irony that Chinese models have been the ones enabling that democratisation!
- swiftcoderThese rules are not new, right? They appear to match the previous guidance (restrictions on top-10 models, exemption for open-source collaboration)
- petcatThe risk is that USA and China will come together on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement in the same way that nuclear technology became restricted by the countries that already had the capability. This will lead to a de facto techno-colonization of the rest of the world just between themselves.This was a topic of discussion at Trump and Xi's AI summit just last month. We're now starting to see the export controls coming into place.
- foo42slightly ot, but this seems like a good place to ask, since I don't think I have the strategic-business mind to understand it all myself: What's the play here with China having supported publishing open weight models this far? I know the official line is for the good of mankind and all that, but presumably it's more strategic than that. Soft power? Commoditise your competition?
- christkvWe really need a foundation that trains open source models. You know what like OpenAI was supposed to be.
- xtajv[grouchy]somebody wake me up when we have "SLSA, but for model provenance".I don't (just) want "open weight + verified distribution". I want a dang audit trail.If/when one of these models is trusted enough to make real decisions with teeth, and if/when one of those decisions screws up badly enough to hurt somebody, I want to be able to play back the tape and pinpoint the source dataset + training method responsible for the failure. At LEAST at a coarse level, on par with something like modern RPO SLAs.P.S. this comment is applicable to pretrained models in general. I don't care if it came from China, USA, or model weights scrawled in sharpie on a random bathroom stall. I just want to know the provenance and have enough information to run a blameless "git blame" (or equivalent) if/when things go wrong.P.P.S. IMHO, we aren't there (yet), but OTOH this proposal ain't a bad place to start.
- lisa_lin93[flagged]
- pelagicAustral[flagged]
- ssdaaBut, but: Local models are the future and everyone can run Kimi 3 at home on a $1 million machine!Maybe not for long. You need another talking point.