Unfortunately, those in power, pretty much all over the world, lie/deceive themselves and believe they can.

In this case depriving US companies would be the point though, so that's not necessarily a disadvantage.

> Anyone who knows anything realises banning things is a) impossible and

Maybe "It's really hard" is more accurate? We (humanity) for most part basically agreed to ban the usage of various chemical weapons in wartime, which seems to have drastically reduced the usage of it, even though it's still used by shit actors today from time to time. But it's hard to deny that usage didn't decrease after banning it, which makes "banning" maybe not completely useless for certain things.

"Banning" things that can be easily copied over cyberweb transportation pipes feels like an fool's errand though, regardless of what it is. It's just too easy to get around, compared to actual physical items I suppose.

It's pretty easy for the US to functionally ban chinese models. They only have to target US firms like inference providers or the biggest users, and pretty much the whole domestic market will fall into line. They don't actually care about the final few %.

Regardless of whether or not adversaries are using them, the US has by far the most compute available, and we've now hit the line where major providers are no longer releasing their best models. The public gets the "current" level of intelligence, while the US government gets to control access to the actual frontier of non-public AI. From their perspective, their enemies using GLM5.3 while they have GPT6 and Mythos6 or whatever is a fine trade.

I don't support a ban at all, nor the US's behavior, I'm just pointing out some facts that change the argument.

The CIA ran one of the world's largest cryptography companies, for DECADES[1]. Are you truly so naive that you believe intelligence agencies that have more to gain from stifling the discovery of vulnerabilities they know of and use wouldn't do so?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

Why would you even believe the opposite? US spooks have been amassing vulnerabilities and relying on them for decades, they literally pioneered it in the 90's if not earlier. Everyone does it now but the US is the biggest of them all. Surely this devalues a lot of what they did. Moreover, the way the US government handled new capabilities, and OpenAI's training policy (they are in bed with the government) just scream "we want to create weapons for cyber-offence and deny them to everyone else"

It might not be the reason, but of course it's a contributing factor.

Intelligence agencies have been known for exploiting and planting software and hardware Buga for decades, going as far as weakening cryptographic standards or intercepting hardware in transit to implant a backdoor device.

Why do you _not_ believe it's a possibility?

Critical thinking says this is not only possible but likely too.

> I'd love to live in a society where people and corporations do good things for PR.

Maybe so, but I'm not sure I'd like to live in China of all places. (Don't get me wrong. Lotta places I'd like to visit if I ever got the chance, and China's on that list, but to live there? I don't think so.) Maybe one of the Nordic countries?

PR for good things doesn’t make money.