I can't tell from the site or the linked twitter handles. Their core ask for every state seems to be "Please support clear safe-harbor language for lawful local AI ownership, research, model modification, open-source publication, and local execution" rather than stopping or amending any specific bill/law.
I do not think there are specific laws yet, but some areas are getting there fast:
* chinese models without safety filters (it could be used to create software exploits)
* AI companion local models (waifus), similar apps are already censored on app stores
* voice and image creation models without safeguards, it could be used to create "revenge porn". Distribution of such models and customizations is already censored
* power hungry energy devices, some may argue you should not be allowed to run "unlicensed datacenter". EU already banned 8k TVs for using too much energy, some places are banning air conditioning
Given the state of corruption in politics, I think Anthropic and OpenAI will likely bribe … oh wait I mean “lobby” … for bans on open source. Otherwise their imaginary trillion dollar valuations make no sense.
This. They can see their valuations slipping. They hope that in a few/several years they will start reaping profits. However, in several years local hardware will be well suited to run models locally at 80-90% efficiency - for "free". You won't need frontier models for daily tasks in a few years. I'd guess.
They already are. Altman is basically begging the US to buy into OAI, that's just the start. Both OAI and Anthropic are going to have to go down this path or their financials will never work out. Open local models are where the enterprise will need to go for any of this to be cost feasible, but we can almost guarantee this will be a battle nobody using AI will have asked for. You can thank Dario and Sam for the dystopian future that will pad their bottom line!
If you're assumptions turned out right what would be the benefit to preassume such an undertaking to succeed? As a warning of what to oppose, it imho conveys too much defeatist suggestiveness. Viewed as expression of a latent submissive desire (a perspective that might be offending, my apologies, but hopefully justifyable as food for thought/curiosity) a kent brookman "I for one welcome our new insect overlords" kind of vibe.
If grandparent commenter means in the sense of being an incredibly heavy user of AI, that does not seem to be initiated by Altman or any AI lab as far as I can tell - by January, the Secretary of War (for example) had already announced that he was directing "the Department of War to accelerate America's Military AI Dominance
by becoming an 'AI-first' warfighting force across all components"[1], which in turn was based on Trump's executive order 3 days after taking office (January 23, 2025) ordering the federal government to accelerate AI use[2].
This whole situation is very reminiscent of how Microsoft was trying to get Linux and open source banned when NT started losing market share on the server.
The Chinese are the open ones, with free downloads, open weights, and loads of published research. The USA with OpenAI is some of the most closed shit out there.
There's gpt-oss from OpenAI, gemma from Google, phi from Microsoft, granite from IBM, nemotron from NVIDIA, Ornith from DeepReinforce, Olmo from the Allen Institute.
"I am eighteen years old, have a good set of passkeys, and believe in Sam Altman, the star-spangled banner, and the fourth of July. I have taken up a BLM lot, cleared up eighteen acres last year, and placed top of it a bitcoin mine. My vibe coded drop-shipping startup looks first-rate, and the conversion rate and total addressable market are bully.
Mock it we might now, but 12 acres and (not too distant future) open weights AI models capable of driving open source robots for farm labor would be huge.
No need for huge expensive purpose built tractors. Even if they’re slow you could have half a dozen running 24/7.
It could provide independence for anyone with a modicum of resources.
For this to work there needs to be a standard protocol for model routing so that you as the user can decide where requests go. You may wish to use mainly local models but at some times for some tasks you'll need to route requests to cloud models.
I've designed the role-model protocol for this, allowing routing between any model, however to function optimally it needs consumer applications to use the protocol when sending requests: https://role-model.dev/concepts/how-role-model-works
In the US at least, repealing a law takes the same number of votes as passing a new one. I don't follow the purpose of this, unless it's to pass a constitutional amendment or something. Or maybe just to get clicks on a website.
And I already have the right to local intelligence, because my GPUs are my private property, and if someone freely releases a beerware model then I can freely download it.
CP = copyrighted property? I don't know what this means.
Yes, illegal things are illegal. Legal things are not illegal. It's very simple. If a "local LLM" (good luck defining that in law) were made illegal, then a petition like this would make sense. Until then, this is pointless FUD over a hypothetical that I place roughly 0.00% odds of ever happening.
They could be more clear and more specific but I would not be surprised to see licensing for this as a means of creating yet another compliancre ceiling and quick cash for state government to pinch out of the productive elements of society (those pinching, mostly lawyers, being glorified parasites that offer nothing to productive society other than pay-to-win access to "justice" and serving as time-shared mouthpieces for plutocrats while claiming to represent everyone within whatever unit of representation they hold).
And when even very intelligent, but excessively conceited, people hear the echo of their own reason9ing from conversational autocorrect and assume it is somehow akin to intelligent life, the normies will go with whatever the plutocrats push with their media outlets too absorbed in their own domain specific knowledge (and cowed into intellectual laziness by other media products they consume eagerly) to ever subject it to much thought that Claude might not be Skynet after all.
> yet another compliance ceiling and quick cash for state government to pinch out of the productive elements of society
The twist is that AI is pushing all white collar jobs further into bureaucratic work. Nobody is losing their jobs and it's not quite a revolution, but despite all odds and headlines the younger generations are actually much better educated and positioned to do the right things as they take over.
An optimistic take is that since this is the middle class we're talking about, we get more productivity and more justice as a result. The only people upset about this are grifters and charlatans whose time is up.
This is one of those things we should absolutely push proactively rather than reactively, if only because I’ve had several “chats” with AI models both local and AIaaS, and all repeat the same talking point that AIaaS is the only sensible, safe, and secure choice.
Which is bullshit, unless you’re an AIaaS company whose revenue is dependent on state-sanctioned market fixing and regulatory capture.
Look, when this shitty cycle ends, we’re likely to find ourselves back in the start of a new memory cycle of surplus and lower costs. We’re talking what very well may be the boom that shatters the 16GB “baseline” we’ve been stuck at for over a decade in consumer computing, and make larger RAM counts (64GB to 1TB+) valuable to consumers specifically for local AI workloads. Local AI isn’t just an enthusiast thing, it’s likely the future of consumer AI provided we don’t let companies and policymakers curtail its use via fearmongering.
Be proactive, and protect consumer right to compute and AI models. Enforce existing laws, don’t outlaw legitimate use just to prop up an unsustainable business model.
Amen. Local AI is the positive future, and SaaS AI is the hellscape. There is a very clear good vs evil boundary here, and every single person involved knows exactly where the boundary is. Those who pretend not to are simply just motivated by things other than the moral good.
> Fraud, cybercrime, CSAM, harassment, nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, discrimination, and sabotage should stay illegal and be enforced seriously.
The "enforced seriously" part is how they will get you. Don't worry, there won't be a blanket ban on local models. Instead, any model that is "certified CSAM-free" or whatever will be perfectly legal. Meaning that it's impossible to prompt it into producing underage smut in any shape or form.
Of course, any model running locally can be easily jailbroken via prefills, and so in practice it will be a blanket ban. But good luck politically standing up against something that is explicitly worded as an anti-CSAM / anti-terrorist measure and nominally constrained to those areas.
Pardon me, so they'll hunt down huggingface, ollama and china? I don't quite understand? What about the millenia of companies that provide apis for local llms and private companies that use local llms for privacy reasons? I don't even understand how you'd execute such a ruleset.
“are”? Source? I've seen an absolute flood of “BREAKING:” claims online recently which are quotes from 3 years ago where all of their context is removed, or that quotes from 3 years ago are “because of GLM 5.2”, etc. https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-hearing-on-pr...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S72ZRBSNHZc [2 weeks ago] -- Dario: "Now what I do worry about with some of these laggard models is the risks of them, where we have Mythos-class cyber capabilities, 12 months from now we'll have much better cyber capabilities. But the Mythos-class cyber capabilities may just be available for anyone to download."
[3] - he does express worry over the risks of open models -- much as he has continually expressed risks over his own models, and was the primary stated reason for founding Anthropic -- but he does not even imply that they should be banned, and he even explicitly says there is nothing that can be done to stop open models from being distributed.
For completeness's sake:
[1] The primary linked source seems to also be the 2023 testimony, albeit posted with a 2026 timestamp.
[2] Does not seem to quote Dario, nor mention banning.
I mean if you go into old AI safety discussion from before LLMs you'll see they don't do that. They go after new hardware. That's way easier than going after software. Hardware doesn't last forever and manufacturers will gladly cripple their cards and license powerful ones to businesses.
Now the investors try to hold the bubble together by regulatory capture. They must really fear the worst. A bailout is going to cost their puppet in the White House even the last supporters in his base.
No chance. Every despot has a cadre of true believers, the types who believe their great leader is playing 4D chess or that its all part of a greater divine plan.
As a future scenario where models become so efficient that _any_ model installed on _any_ computer could be considered "a national security risk"?
IDK, I don't live in the US, and I have no idea which "possible law" this website is referring to. In any case, it could be seen as a proactive effort to keep the gates open.
As a side note, I think this is a discussion every open-source supporter should have by actively considering the risks and what actions to take if such a hypothetical law were ever to pass.
Totally off topic but this just came to me so happy to burn a little karma.
Here’s a plot of a sci-fi thriller. What if, unbeknownst to most, when the vendors were claiming that there AI was too dangerous, they weren’t referring to an increment on what was already out there, but to something far different and more capable. Conscious even! What if that then came up with the financial scheme to end all schemes, knowing that human greed is eminently exploitable, and that the build out of all the global DCs was actually all about removing single points of failure for itself while secretly building out a robot army! We’ll be well on the way to capitalism-ing our own demise.
Maybe Steven Spielberg can make this his next project.
The biggest threat to the hyper-scalers is small bespoked models run locally. You don't need the world's stolen information to run a small project containing locally trained data you collected. But you do need to block everyone if you want to capture the entire market and get the trillion dollar valuation.
Laws restricting the use of local AI/LLMs are not going to happen, no matter how much Anthropic might want it. All the major OEMs are now counting on local LLMs to take off. Just look at the OEM support for the upcoming Nvidia RTX Spark platform: Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, MSI. All the big names in the industry will have, by the end of this year, Nvidia-powered machines made specifically for local LLM use.
And Adobe! I've always figured their heart can't really be in the business of running a cloud platform that has to decide what people can and can't edit.
Blackmagic Design too.
They are all desperate for Windows to run well on a chip with unified VRAM.
There's a lot of capital that stands to gain from banning local AI, but there's also a lot that wins either way, or only wins if local AI sticks around.
Apple is paying for their cloud AI, but they can make customers buy devices for local AI. There's all the PC and Android handset makers (ASUS, HP, countless Chinese brands, etc.) who only really stand to gain from selling hardware to customers. Not to mention that Nvidia/AMD/Intel would all happily take a cut on both halves of the ecosystem.
And this is exactly my point, the OEMs have more lobbying power and leverage. Anthropic might be valuated at whatever amount, but they're a new player and their only product is a piece of software - which other like Google, OpenAI, etc also have.
They'll do local LLMs you have to pay for. Best of both worlds: your LLM processing power will be locked behind a subscription.
You'll be coerced into a subscription to unlock the processing power you already have, and it'll only be usable by official Microsoft, etc implementations.
They get your money, get to control you, and best of all, they don't have to run it themselves in their data centers
The obvious brain-child of this concept is HP and their consumer inkjet printers. Originally, they sold their printers for "cheap" and then sold ink for a premium. However, as consumers realized any old printer ink works just as well as "HP"'s ink, they created DRM for ink-cartridges.
Now, you have to basically use their "Instant Ink" monthly service in order to print anything, based on my understanding. $6 for 50 pages a month: https://www.hp.com/us-en/print
(If you try using non-official cartridges, the printer may refuse to print entirely. If you cancel the sub, the printer will refuse to print until you renew or find DRM ink).
I don't see a price for the subscription yet, but it seems they are targeting 2030 for a subscription fee lock-in.
Intel did "Intel Upgrade Service", which locked already fabricated features on a CPU behind what is equivalent to today's same-day DLC - you paid more money, got a code, and it unlocked more cache and/or hyperthreading capabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service
The backlash in 2010 on Intel was probably severe enough to delay it significantly, but with many industries trying it out (Cameras, TV's, fridges, cars, etc.), consumers probably won't have many options left.
Not sure about Google, but these Nvidia RTX Spark machines are specifically a Microsoft+Nvidia partnership. Microsoft is actually pushing hard on Windows security primitives for agents & local AI. At BUILD this year they used the phrase "unmetered local intelligence" more times than I can count.
From their blog about the RTX Spark surface ultra
> purpose-built to develop and run up to 1 trillion-parameter frontier AI models locally
Google may not want it, but Microsoft has a ton of lobbying power, and being primarily an enterprise software and services company, they know local AI is important for their own customers, and will also be important to sustain the PC OEMs that are threatened by a move toward thin client like devices.
> 3d printing control laws that are being passed in NY
The "don't print guns" laws? What lobby would that be? I actually agree that the US is very vulnerable to lobbying and that 3d printing restrictions are dumb, but I have no idea how you connected the two.
The “install software that phones home to [government db] to check if the tube shape you want to print on the tool you bought and own is different enough from another tube that’s been used in a gun” laws?
> Laws restricting the use of local AI/LLMs are not going to happen
Are you sure? There are already laws against what you can do at home with very basic (pun) fundamentals of reality like chemistry.
Someone simply searching for "How to assassinate Trump" could get arrested for a thought crime. Hell this comment alone likely set off a few flags.
Imagine someone running an AI at home and asking it for planning a hit on someone. Cue same media fearmongering wave as with 3D printing guns and woops now it's mandatory for operating systems to watch your screen and all your keystrokes.
Fuck I probably gave some of the control freaks in power some ideas there :(
I think you are assuming those companies won't sign on to be on a list of "authorized model operators", while letting it become illegal for you to run deepseek yourself.
it would be so easy to rent GPUs in europe and use unbannable encryption (tor,i2p if needed) to get inference from them. that remaining as an option makes banning local AI pointless. if all else fails I'm sure china will be able to sell to NK some GPUs and we can get inference from them lmao
Can you use an LLM to teach you how to build a gun or use it to design a gun for you build? Can an LLM be used to generate images of young people for older perverts? If yes, then it's not very hard to make the argument that you need to be licensed in order to run an LLM on your local machine. Why wouldn't you want to be licensed? Are you against protecting children and public safety? Many students die from gun violence every year and massive amounts of minors are taken advantage of by human filth. Why would you be against protecting the most vulnerable in our society?
It will look good for politicians who pass legislation to "protect" the vulnerable. Potentially improving the chances of another term due to the marketing benefits of pushing such a law through. I think you are mistaken believing that this may never happen.
Yeah. I suspect parent either is very optimistic or does know not how restricted current batch of language models are already or does not recognize that, while it may some time to completely neuter, they do have time.
It seems that powers that be learned something from the world wide web deployment.
In the US, attaching legislation like that to firearms instructions would doom its success. It sounds like a great idea to ratfuck a potential bill. No Republican would be able to pass a bill that bans local agents from helping citizens exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.
The politics are probably different in other countries. We're still seeing Chat Control efforts in the EU.
By the same logic, you would need to license Google and youtube access. Just because it's interactive, doesn't change the premise. But yes, that exactly the arguments Anthropic and OpenAI will use for the regulatory capture.
Wait until they figure out regular people can just use photoshop to hand make photorealistic depictions and regular CAD software to make gun parts. Better license computer use, too.
I love how Nvidia is playing both sides. No matter whether AI's future is local or on the cloud, they come out ahead. I suspect they're going to be the biggest beneficiaries from the AI run up.
144 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] threadIn the worst case it communicates the magnitude of dismsissiveness while demonstrating your intention to claim agency.
One they _could_ be referring to is the California AI Transparency Act which isn't compatible with open source licensing, see https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/g...
* chinese models without safety filters (it could be used to create software exploits)
* AI companion local models (waifus), similar apps are already censored on app stores
* voice and image creation models without safeguards, it could be used to create "revenge porn". Distribution of such models and customizations is already censored
* power hungry energy devices, some may argue you should not be allowed to run "unlicensed datacenter". EU already banned 8k TVs for using too much energy, some places are banning air conditioning
Where did you hear this? All the results I can find say the opposite that the US would buy anything.
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855671/-1/-1/0/art...
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202500170/pdf/DCPD-...
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-proposes-handing-tru...
The Chinese are the open ones, with free downloads, open weights, and loads of published research. The USA with OpenAI is some of the most closed shit out there.
Aside from that you're 100% correct.
No need for huge expensive purpose built tractors. Even if they’re slow you could have half a dozen running 24/7.
It could provide independence for anyone with a modicum of resources.
I've designed the role-model protocol for this, allowing routing between any model, however to function optimally it needs consumer applications to use the protocol when sending requests: https://role-model.dev/concepts/how-role-model-works
And I already have the right to local intelligence, because my GPUs are my private property, and if someone freely releases a beerware model then I can freely download it.
What am I missing?
but I wouldn't advise it
Yes, illegal things are illegal. Legal things are not illegal. It's very simple. If a "local LLM" (good luck defining that in law) were made illegal, then a petition like this would make sense. Until then, this is pointless FUD over a hypothetical that I place roughly 0.00% odds of ever happening.
And when even very intelligent, but excessively conceited, people hear the echo of their own reason9ing from conversational autocorrect and assume it is somehow akin to intelligent life, the normies will go with whatever the plutocrats push with their media outlets too absorbed in their own domain specific knowledge (and cowed into intellectual laziness by other media products they consume eagerly) to ever subject it to much thought that Claude might not be Skynet after all.
The twist is that AI is pushing all white collar jobs further into bureaucratic work. Nobody is losing their jobs and it's not quite a revolution, but despite all odds and headlines the younger generations are actually much better educated and positioned to do the right things as they take over.
An optimistic take is that since this is the middle class we're talking about, we get more productivity and more justice as a result. The only people upset about this are grifters and charlatans whose time is up.
Which is bullshit, unless you’re an AIaaS company whose revenue is dependent on state-sanctioned market fixing and regulatory capture.
Look, when this shitty cycle ends, we’re likely to find ourselves back in the start of a new memory cycle of surplus and lower costs. We’re talking what very well may be the boom that shatters the 16GB “baseline” we’ve been stuck at for over a decade in consumer computing, and make larger RAM counts (64GB to 1TB+) valuable to consumers specifically for local AI workloads. Local AI isn’t just an enthusiast thing, it’s likely the future of consumer AI provided we don’t let companies and policymakers curtail its use via fearmongering.
Be proactive, and protect consumer right to compute and AI models. Enforce existing laws, don’t outlaw legitimate use just to prop up an unsustainable business model.
Misleading title.
The article is about local "AI".
> Fraud, cybercrime, CSAM, harassment, nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, discrimination, and sabotage should stay illegal and be enforced seriously.
The "enforced seriously" part is how they will get you. Don't worry, there won't be a blanket ban on local models. Instead, any model that is "certified CSAM-free" or whatever will be perfectly legal. Meaning that it's impossible to prompt it into producing underage smut in any shape or form.
Of course, any model running locally can be easily jailbroken via prefills, and so in practice it will be a blanket ban. But good luck politically standing up against something that is explicitly worded as an anti-CSAM / anti-terrorist measure and nominally constrained to those areas.
[1] https://memeburn.com/amodei-says-open-source-ai-is-becoming-... [2 July 2026]
[2] https://fortune.com/2026/07/02/anthropic-fable-and-mythos-ar... [July 2, 2026]
[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S72ZRBSNHZc [2 weeks ago] -- Dario: "Now what I do worry about with some of these laggard models is the risks of them, where we have Mythos-class cyber capabilities, 12 months from now we'll have much better cyber capabilities. But the Mythos-class cyber capabilities may just be available for anyone to download."
[4] https://digg.com/tech/zx1bqifo
[3] - he does express worry over the risks of open models -- much as he has continually expressed risks over his own models, and was the primary stated reason for founding Anthropic -- but he does not even imply that they should be banned, and he even explicitly says there is nothing that can be done to stop open models from being distributed.
For completeness's sake:
[1] The primary linked source seems to also be the 2023 testimony, albeit posted with a 2026 timestamp.
[2] Does not seem to quote Dario, nor mention banning.
IDK, I don't live in the US, and I have no idea which "possible law" this website is referring to. In any case, it could be seen as a proactive effort to keep the gates open.
As a side note, I think this is a discussion every open-source supporter should have by actively considering the risks and what actions to take if such a hypothetical law were ever to pass.
Here’s a plot of a sci-fi thriller. What if, unbeknownst to most, when the vendors were claiming that there AI was too dangerous, they weren’t referring to an increment on what was already out there, but to something far different and more capable. Conscious even! What if that then came up with the financial scheme to end all schemes, knowing that human greed is eminently exploitable, and that the build out of all the global DCs was actually all about removing single points of failure for itself while secretly building out a robot army! We’ll be well on the way to capitalism-ing our own demise.
Maybe Steven Spielberg can make this his next project.
Local training? Is that feasible?
Trying to establish the right to run models locally while we still can makes more sense than waiting to see if they do try, then organizing too late.
Blackmagic Design too.
They are all desperate for Windows to run well on a chip with unified VRAM.
Apple is paying for their cloud AI, but they can make customers buy devices for local AI. There's all the PC and Android handset makers (ASUS, HP, countless Chinese brands, etc.) who only really stand to gain from selling hardware to customers. Not to mention that Nvidia/AMD/Intel would all happily take a cut on both halves of the ecosystem.
You'll be coerced into a subscription to unlock the processing power you already have, and it'll only be usable by official Microsoft, etc implementations.
They get your money, get to control you, and best of all, they don't have to run it themselves in their data centers
Now, you have to basically use their "Instant Ink" monthly service in order to print anything, based on my understanding. $6 for 50 pages a month: https://www.hp.com/us-en/print
(If you try using non-official cartridges, the printer may refuse to print entirely. If you cancel the sub, the printer will refuse to print until you renew or find DRM ink).
LG is pushing for subscription models in their fridge line-ups: https://www.pcmag.com/news/lg-wants-you-to-subscribe-to-your...
I don't see a price for the subscription yet, but it seems they are targeting 2030 for a subscription fee lock-in.
Intel did "Intel Upgrade Service", which locked already fabricated features on a CPU behind what is equivalent to today's same-day DLC - you paid more money, got a code, and it unlocked more cache and/or hyperthreading capabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service
The backlash in 2010 on Intel was probably severe enough to delay it significantly, but with many industries trying it out (Cameras, TV's, fridges, cars, etc.), consumers probably won't have many options left.
From their blog about the RTX Spark surface ultra
> purpose-built to develop and run up to 1 trillion-parameter frontier AI models locally
Google may not want it, but Microsoft has a ton of lobbying power, and being primarily an enterprise software and services company, they know local AI is important for their own customers, and will also be important to sustain the PC OEMs that are threatened by a move toward thin client like devices.
The "don't print guns" laws? What lobby would that be? I actually agree that the US is very vulnerable to lobbying and that 3d printing restrictions are dumb, but I have no idea how you connected the two.
Gun control lobbying groups are pushing for these laws.
https://www.everytown.org/solutions/stop-spread-of-3d-printe...
Are you sure? There are already laws against what you can do at home with very basic (pun) fundamentals of reality like chemistry.
Someone simply searching for "How to assassinate Trump" could get arrested for a thought crime. Hell this comment alone likely set off a few flags.
Imagine someone running an AI at home and asking it for planning a hit on someone. Cue same media fearmongering wave as with 3D printing guns and woops now it's mandatory for operating systems to watch your screen and all your keystrokes.
Fuck I probably gave some of the control freaks in power some ideas there :(
It will look good for politicians who pass legislation to "protect" the vulnerable. Potentially improving the chances of another term due to the marketing benefits of pushing such a law through. I think you are mistaken believing that this may never happen.
It seems that powers that be learned something from the world wide web deployment.
The politics are probably different in other countries. We're still seeing Chat Control efforts in the EU.
> I think the crypto community took the wrong side in that fight. We should have lobbied to keep it counted as weaponry.
> Why?
> Once they get complacent, we break out the second amendment.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-go...
Now where I could agree with you is if you made the argument on a state-by-state level. Pretty sure what you said would hold up in Texas