Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act of 2025’’.
SEC. 3. PROHIBITIONS ON IMPORT AND EXPORT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGY OR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
(a) PROHIBITION ON IMPORTATION.—On and after the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.
Currently, China has the best open source models in text, video and music generation.
489
Comments119
These fucking clowns just refuse to learn about how technology works. Fucking morons.
The generation that can't figure out their TV remote is attempting to legislate on cutting edge technology. Fucking series of tubes all over again. It never stopped though really.
The series of tubes is actually a better analogy than what this Bill imagines the internet to be.
This bill is likely sponsored by Sam Altman himself
You don't expect this law to count for the people at the top, do you?
I'm not even in to this shit and I'm going to download it right now because fuck those assholes.
Can someone explain briefly what I need to download that might not be available if this comes to pass? Like I did some searching and I saw stuff about Ollama but it wasn't completely clear if that would be affected by this.
https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1
Very simple with ollama
So if I download this and somehow there is no longer a way to access the model online this will still work? I'm just a bit confused because I read a couple things that made it seem like even though the model is running locally it still needs a connection for some reason, if that isn't true I'm sorry for the dumb question.
On first run it downloads the model, then you just run it locally
Thank you, that answers my question exactly.
So if I get a new computer in a few months it will no loner work. Maybe we can VPN into Sweden?
I assume you know you can transfer files from one pc to a other?
Jeeez, just copy the ollama's directory (something like .ollama) from user's dir to wherever. You can check and find the files inside. I find the published 14b really useful, it's ten GB that think and reason in english.
Technically this isn't the case. These are Deepseek distilled with Qwen and Llama depending on the weight, so they are no longer Deepseek.
@[email protected] this is the official, extremely large, one. https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
Well yes, it does specifically say so in the link. There's also one with the full model in what I linked
Oh nice, when Ollama first had this up I don't think the 671b model was there. I stand corrected on that!
Something about https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 , or at least that's the model that everyone's been talking about recently. It looks like it'd be half a terabyte to clone the entire repo though, and I don't know how to use it either ...
Doesn't matter. People in the US already have the model, so sharing it within the US wouldn't be illegal, and the law would only apply to anything "imported" 180 days after the law is passed (if it's passed at all).
Also, how "importing" is defined will matter for any future legal arguments, and I would imagine this law would eventually be struck down for being overbroad.
Run it using ollama in a terminal (like ollama run model_name), ask it a question.
Ah, the supporters of the free market strike again. No competition allowed, Sam Altman and his American billionaire peers are entitled to all the money.
Oh well. The rest of the world can benefit from Chinese AI models.
That number is way too low.
Oh what’s that? Yeah that’s Barbara Streisand’s house
It is much worse. I hope I am reading it wrong, but:
This would mean that importing and exporting literally any piece of IT equipment, from a Ubuntu installer to a RAM chip, is illegal. Good luck & have fun.
It's good old "everything is now illegal" law, selective enforcement does the rest. Straight out of the young dictatorship handbook
Rip iPhone.
Yes, yes, burn it all. Make the people very very angry. It takes a lot to engage a Luddite and we need them all.
US is getting very desperate
Lol, protectionism for the administration's fellators.
Capitalism truly thrives on competition and innovation
So you can't download them, you should run them directly on tencent cloud or something? Smart...
I don't even like ai but this just makes me want to download Deepseek as much as I can
Yes, that will show them for sure
The Land of the free sure likes taking away freedoms and banning stuff
That's why I consider that tagline, 'The Land of the Free,' to be the failed punchline of a bad joke now. It hasn't meant anything since before Reagan took office at least.
I don't consider it valid so long as conscription exists, but now it's an utter joke
People there have chosen that by voting republican. I mean, he told what he planned to do and got voted for anyway..
Freedom, but only for rich, white douchebags
One word: pathetic.
8 words: hilary clinton ai voice talking about ball sucking
Alright, now I'm hooked
The benefit of being an early adopter is my folder full of Donald Trump/Congressional Republicans suckin' and fuckin' before all of the fun models got taken down from easy access.
What next? Outlaw chinese food?
ABSOLUTELY NO COMPETITION ALLOWED.
We'll call it FREEDOM FOOD. Please, pass the FREEDOM beef chow fun, and the AMERICAN Fortune cookies, and BALD EAGLE AR-15 green tea.
bald eagle sheds a single tear 🦅 💧
Pretty sure fortune cookies are American anyway? Pretty sure they aren't chinese
A succulent Chinese meal!?
Josh Hawley is a complete waste.
Had to lookup the penalties since this document just pointed somewhere else:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ96/html/PLAW-110publ96.htm
Well, now I'm downloading them all and backing them up.
And the ones I can, I'm going to fork on GitHub just so they have my name.
Bring it on.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
This country is so cooked.
Always has been.
bang.
I thought software and thus code was protected as free speech?
The right to free speak can be compromised if it interferes with other, more important rights...
... like the right of shareholders to make money.
Free speech and expression is one of the many previously-thought-to-be-inalienable rights that are in the current administration's crosshairs. If I could flee this country for, say, the Netherlands, I'd do so in a heartbeat, unfortunately I can't.
The Netherlands would be high on my list, too. What a pleasant place.
NJB's praise of their infrastructure would have me sold on them if I could actually flee the US.
Neil jeGrasse Byson?
Not Just Bikes.
Government banned Chinese AI?
Step 1: ask a friend from any other country to fork the model (brotip: use magnets for faster acquiring a friend)
Step 2: have your friend rename the AI.
Step 3: now the model is from said country.
Step 4: download the model from said fork.
OpenAI will go bankrupt. US Government will be jelly. Problem?
the law isn't meant to bar you from downloading it. it's meant to prevent use in a business setting
They are afraid. Very afraid. Good.
Time to start seeding DeepSeek R1 I guess.
So, only the rest of the world gets superior technology.
The investors will love that.
Ah yes, the "free market" in action.
We are rotten to the core.
Not me. It's the rest of you.
In other news, Chinese restaurants will serve only burgers, fries and shakes, and will be called Freedom restaurants.
China : Discovers Anti-gravity
USA : Law preventing study of anti-gravity
Being open weights, if I, resident of Ijustmadeitupista n take it and make a very slight tweak, would it be OK for this rule?
And, if my pal from China takes a US open model and tweaks it to criticize CCP, will it be banned?
I honestly think politicians should think just a bit before trying to legislate things they clearly don't understand.
The way it's written, it sounds like we could download it in the US, after the law was passed, for 180 days, and then do whatever we want with it. Unfortunately, after that point, the test of it being "developed" in China would probably be met for anything but a near-total rewrite.
LOL. Next they start burning books?
start?
Deleting CDC data is effectively the same thing.
Continue
Torrenting is going to be wild in 2025.
At least until they decide to Make it illegal for ISPs to allow you to torrent.
And yes I hear all the people saying can't, won't, laws, to which I say those things are all tenuous at best at the moment.
Doesn't a VPN already circumvent this? ISPs already send out copyright violation emails if you torrent the wrong thing, but not if you do it through a VPN.
From a Sony legal perspective, yes.
When Big Brother decides to force ISPs to tamp it down, they'll do stuff like set limits on unidentifiable traffic, set caps just above reasonable streaming levels.
When there's no freedom of speech, no right to be innocent, you can tell who's torrenting, especially if you don't have to be 100% right to kick them off your network.
How about forming end to end encrypted wireless ad hoc networks?
Meshes are powerful. They're great at the community level, but scale is an issue.
With the low price of very large thumb drives these days, sneakernet would work.
It would be interesting to see something DHT like IPFS overhauled to work on intermittent mesh networks.
Maybe something in between IPFS and SoulSeek. You keep a list of what you want, when someone comes on line with it you get it, or perhaps we all set aside a couple hundred gigs to fulfill requests.
How would they even attempt to implement this? Will the US end up with a Great Firewall like China has? Even if Chinese models are delisted from Hugging Face (since Hugging Face is a US company and has to follow US law), they could just be hosted elsewhere.
Most likely, they'll just enforce it against businesses using it since they're the cash cow as far as OpenAI, meta et all are concerned
As far as I know they still haven't forced all government agencies to use AI, which was talked about... So they also have a cash cow there.
Err, DOD is buying into OpenAI to manage the nuclear weapons.
...I have no words.
I'd like to point out that it is only one single proposal. If this does not get shut down, then it is time to be worried. But for now, it might just be one glue-sniffing Congressperson sniffing the wrong kind of glue one morning.
It is a single proposal but maybe anybody with an extra terabyte sitting around might want to hold on to a copy
I already have every version downloaded on my nas, more cause I hate redownloading things and am a pack rat.
Same
So rather than build off their successes we're just gonna put up a blinder and hope they don't completely leave us in the dust?
You're expecting coherent policy from the guy that shut the entire country down for a day, because he's an idiot?
If I have seen further, it is by
standing on the shoulders of giantsblinding everyone else LOLThey are just doing protectionism for Meta and OpenAI monopoly and shooting rest of the american economy in the foot by doing it. Anybody who isn't openAI one of these tech giants will have to use less effective american gen-AIs, that they can't self host for free for much less cost provided that they have servers. This Just to protect companies like openAI, that relied on the idea that people will have to come to them, so they can set the prize and still harvest their data and even insert all the right political narratives into the model, like what happened with chatgpt and palestine. All of this because few weeks ago good AI was supposed to super hard and scarce and now it isn't.
Can they even enforce this is the question? Will ISP's be forced to ban the deepseek site? Will they criminalize people self hosting deepseek on their home servers? Still that 180 days is just a call to download deepseek and modify it a little bit as it not to be chinese anymore and start hosting it as some alternative.
Good luck trying to ban OSS next, which would criminalize basically everyone who's ever used a browser that isn't IE, everyone who's ever used an Android phone or a Chromebook, everyone who's ever used any modern audio or video codec as the bulk of those are OSS too, and would destroy both Big Data and the Cloud, both of which are primarily Linux-based, and send the US back to the web's dark ages, as in going back to when BBSes were popular.
Also, since this bill punishes people by making them spend most of their lives in prison, how are they going to lock up everyone who’s ever used Chromium or Firefox browsers, for example, or everyone who’s ever used Android or ChromeOS, which is most of the country’s population at this point, should that ban extend to a general OSS ban? (this part was originally a reply but I moved it to the main post)
Criminalizing something broadly isn’t usually done with the intention of going after everyone who does it, it’s so when they do single out someone they can charge them even if they haven’t actually caught them doing anything wrong (besides the thing everybody does).
See also: the way laws about taxes and drugs are often enforced.
They're american, they'd just pick one rich guy to 'own' all Foss projects and make it freenium within a year
Good luck with that too, especially as GPL3 has a clause specifically forbidding tivoization built into it.
The type of thing RH is doing with the RHEL EULA in order to attempt to circumvent GPL2 protections? Yeah, that wouldn't fly under GPL3.
Til a judge 'interprets' that as being specifically about a company named TiVo or invalidates it in the supreme court.
Yk back in my day it was even unthinkable to have a president decide your gender for you, the precedent already being created is insane.
That doesn't sound like a free market to me.
ngl them not wanting me to download it makes me want to download it more than anything else, and I'm usually against ai
I'm surprised usually Hawley is pro running
This is running. It's running away from competition.
Awesome, so on top of all the other crap, like a economy that is going off a cliff, the US wants to actually get further behind on AI, just so that assman van make a few extra dollars
This is why we gotta ban TikTok!!!! \s
Seriously tho it's a bummer to see how many people here promote all this horseshit.
The paste does not go back in the tube....
It can if you kind of squeeze the tube a little bit and then let it suck the paste back in. But it's really tedious.
I was playing this whole thing out in my head, and trying to justify the confidence of Trump and pals with such seemingly stupid moves. The only thing I can think of is that they believe that the money they will save (steal) from the government cuts, etc, will make up for the huge losses from the tariffs. And then they would have to believe that their internal AI development is at a point where they can overpower every other nation on earth, and so they don't need those international relations anymore. I mean, technically every single Tesla in the world is a camera for Elon, and a huge percentage of internet traffic goes through US servers.
But then I think, even if they do have all of these advantages, China seems to be catching up pretty quickly, is allied with over 50% of the planet through BRICS, has protected itself from their technological expansion. This is not even including that most other countries in the world will probably want to distance themselves from the US if this keeps up.
Either I'm in denial, or it really is just Trump and Elon are being blinded by their overinflated egos.
There's always the worst possible option: they're true believers. They genuinely believe the rest of the world is freeloading on the US, and that (atlas) shrugging them off will make everyone else collapse.
This would also effectively ban the use of any research produced by a Chinese national. Any papers which cite the work of Chinese labs (most of them) would be illegal, as this could be interpreted as aiding Chinese AI research.
This is designed to stop businesses to use locally deployed models and be forced to deploy cloud services by any of the cocksuckers that sat frontlins in the inauguration.
BuT tHe FrEe mArKeT
so basically more cenaorship because china?
Yeah, we should only be allowed to download their social media apps?
uh... no.
Just try to stop me. Or anyone for that matter.
The "does it connect to the wifi" mfers came up with this one I'm sure.
Hey deepseek. Remake Lemon Party but with Trump, Vance, and Elon.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2069436850145993
50 States, 50 Protests, 1day
Feb 5 @ your downtown.