BRIEF
Anthropic is pleading for special protections, after Chinese lab Moonshot dropped Kimi, an “open-weight” model, usable on private hardware and matching or beating U.S. frontier performance.
Ask: lock down chips, block China, keep the moat.
What's going on?
Good morning,
Everyone wants to win the AI race.
Anthropic just asked the refs to ban the other car.
Export controls don't make your car faster.
They clear the track.
Onwards,
Austin Campbell
Teaching DeFi at NYU Stern
Bridging TradFi at Zero Knowledge
PS. Zero Knowledge’s team works hard to produce this for you.
If you like it, share it with your colleagues 👇 We’ll send you socks.
🏹 BACK UP
Source: Rake It Up by Yo Gotti ft.Nikki Minaj, Epic Records 2017
Trump's beef with China has run through everything. Trade. Chips. Now AI.
And now the beef runs in reverse: the labs are asking Washington for the protection.
It looks like an arms race (the arms are not the same).
$45B
$3 / $15 per million tokens
~70% cheaper to run
Open weights
Anyone can download it
Nobody can switch it off
$965B
$10 / $50 per million tokens
Closed weights
Anthropic serves it
D.C. can switch it off
⏳ BREAKDOWN
. JUN 9.
Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Frontier capability. Strong safety classifiers on the public version.
. JUN 12.
Commerce Department (Lutnick) issues an export-control directive citing national security authorities.
Access suspended for any foreign national, anywhere, including foreign employees inside the U.S.
Anthropic takes both models offline worldwide.
. JUN 27.
Partial thaw. Lutnick: “appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access” Mythos 5.
Government allows Mythos 5 for a limited set of U.S. critical-infrastructure organizations. Letter →
. JUN 30.
Controls lifted after Anthropic adds updated cybersecurity safeguards.
. JUL 1.
Access restored. Like nothing happened.
. JUL 26.
Moonshot drops Kimi K3 open weights. 2.8T MoE. Free to download. Impossible to recall.
Performance in the same neighborhood as Fable 5.
. JUL 27.
Anthropic publishes its position: keep the chip bans, crack down on industrial distillation, mandate safety testing. Explicitly not a ban on open weights. But they asked. Amodei’s post →
ZERO INSIGHTS
AI 2060: The Dystopia of Gates
“I do not wear burlap. I do not sleep above a stable or spend dawn bent over wet barley. The manor has excellent internet. Starlink provides it, by license, from a clean white dish fixed to the roof like a government ear.”
In this week’s Zero Insights, Austin Campbell imagines a future where intelligence isn’t just metered - it’s totally controlled.
🎭 BUSTED
Anthropic says "safety." It looks a lot like the safety of their business model.
WTF IS LEGIT
Banning Chinese cloud platforms, where your data leaves the building, is defensible.
Booz Allen found that for U.S. government prompts, Chinese models Qwen and MiniMax produced 130% and 20% more vulnerable code.
WTF?
Open weights can't be un-released.
Locking down chips and steering everyone into the padded model isn't security.
It's securing a moat.
💰 BAG HOLDERS
WINNERS, IF WE STAY OPEN
Open-weight models. Individuals. U.S. capability, sharpened by competition. Venture capitalists.
LOSERS, IF WE STAY OPEN
Anthropic. OpenAI. Holders of AI model company stock or debt. Effective Altruists.
ZERO OUT
The pitch? Safety (and don't ask whose)
1️⃣ A lab asking the government to ban its cheaper competition
2️⃣ Special pleading dressed as national security
BEST CASE
Open competition delivers the greatest benefits to all people.
American labs get faster because they have to.
WORST CASE
USA: United States of Anthropic.
China dominates the AI arms race.
Source: Rake It Up by Yo Gotti ft.Nikki Minaj, Epic Records 2017
ZERO INSIDER
Showed up in the latest Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO's Trump & Crypto deep dive. Starring in the 60 Minutes clip at 17:10, on how a certain coin became one of the largest stablecoins in the world. Still counts.
Stopped by The Farm to talk about Prediction Markets and the Extropian Dream - the origins of the likes of Kalshi and Polymarket in defense projects like Total Information Awareness.
Also gave maybe my favorite interview ever: Episode 2 of .thedotfiles, on my work investigating crypto and fraud. SBF from Jane Street to the stand, effective altruism, AI doomerism as marketing. A pretty good primer on my work if you’re curious.
Shirley Yu
Produced Perena x Zero Knowledges’ “But Why” Ep. 1 on Blockchains. Got 5-10 mins? Have you asked yourself : “Why Blockchain?” Check it out.