If you have more money than god, you no longer get to play the "I didn't know" game. You have the resources. If you don't know, you made a choice to not know.
Chinese models are developed by Chinese corporate. they are free and open weight because they are the underdog atm. they are not here for fun, they are here to compete.
1. There would absolutely be mass resignations, especially at a company like Anthropic that has such an image (rightfully or wrongfully) of “the moral choice”. 2. No one talented will then go work for a government-run LLM building org. Both from a “not working in a bureaucracy” angle and a “top talent won’t accept meager government wages” angle (plus plenty of “won’t work for trump” angle) 3. With how fast things move, Anthropic would become irrelevant in like 3 months if they’re not pumping out next gen model updates.
Then one of the big American LLM companies would be gone from the scene, allowing for more opportunity for competition (including Chinese labs)
It would be the most shortsighted nationalization ever.
I think you massively underestimate how many people would have no problem working for their government on this. Just look at the recent research into the Persona system for ID verification, where submitting your ID places you on a permanent government watchlist to check if you're not a terrorist. There's a whole list of engineers and PhDs and researchers present who have built this system.
>> “top talent won’t accept meager government wages” angle
Again, that's wishful thinking - plenty of people want to work in cybersecurity in AI research for the government agencies, even if the pay isn't anywhere close to the private sector. This isn't exclusive to the US either - in the UK MI5 pays peanuts compared to the private companies for IT specialists, yet they have plenty of people who want to work for them, either because of patriotism for their country and willingness to "help".