I can understand (not necessarily defend) protectionism for products with nonzero manufacturing cost and some required physical size and such.

I am befuddled when the same policies are applied to products with marginally zero manufacturing cost, no real physical size, and such. Regulating ideas is hard folks.

The cost of those output tokens is not zero or marginal.

The first token on a new AI rig costs $X (full capex cost) then every token after that costs virtually zero. Over time the cost/token trends towards zero (modulo opex). That said, AI does have higher opex than general SaaS so it can’t get as close to zero.

But that’s kind of a different question, the running of some service. The “product”, the model, is a collection of files. The “manufacturing” required to add another customer is “send them the files” and has ~zero marginal cost.

There is a finite number of tokens that a rig will turn out over it's lifetime. Divide the cost of the rig plus electricity by that number and you have your cost per token. Yes providers can screw up on scheduling and end up paying more than they should, but that's not magic.

The AI rigs cost money, sure. But no one is talking about regulating those. We are talking about regulating models, which do have zero cost of reproduction.

It’s like banning the leaked DeCSS key. Good luck.

Well, no. We're mostly talking about banning access to models running on someone else's infra.

I don't think many people in this thread have the resources to run a frontier model in their living room.

How do you do that without banning the model itself.

It doesn't matter who can or can't run it.

They are trying to ban something that can be represented entirely by a sequence of bytes. An illegal number, like the DeCSS key.

The fact that money is involved does not change the free speech aspects. This isn't CSAM or torture porn. It's data.

It's not the model weights people are panicking over losing access to though. It's the compute.

If you mean being forced to overpay for no-longer-SOTA closed models, that’s I guess the protectionist motive here: impossible to enforce, enforcement uneven and political, illegality rampant, I suppose all by design too. I’d say it’s brilliant if it weren’t so evil. I have hope saner minds will prevail.

You could run the inference locally using the open weight models. Then you'd still get to use the models without sending money overseas

>I am befuddled when the same policies are applied to products with marginally zero manufacturing cost, no real physical size, and such.

Because it's not about perfect obstructionism, it's about adding red tape to businesses that end up relenting and going to a frontier model. If this gets these frontier models an extra few million dollars in exchange for greasing some palms, that's a business success.

> because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands

Is that objectively true? True after factoring in harms they do to human rights and the environment?

Nope.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/may/12/c...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...

Remember, even EU despite claiming to be morally superior to the US, heavily tariffs BYD (much more than the tariffs that the globe mocks Trump for). https://thenextweb.com/news/byd-rejects-hungary-environmenta...

> Is that objectively true?

objectively true. And there's zero need to factor in things like "human rights" or "environmental protection", because these are costs that have been externalized and the consumer don't pay for it (in their lifetime anyway). That's what objectively means.

Chinese cars are unavailable in the US because US manufacturers are 100% unable to compete. Japan was in the exact same position before, but because of ally status, japanese car companies (with their gov't as the proxy) managed to negotiate and have a "voluntary import restriction" in place to protect US manufacturers. This artificial restriction created a higher price for consumers than it ordinarily would have been.

The japanese car manufacturers were also able to setup shop in the US, and instead of exporting, they manufacturered directly on US soil. They're allowed to do this sole because they're an ally, and i don't expect this same to be allowed for chinese companies.

> because US manufacturers are 100% unable to compete.

In the June just passed Tesla Model Y is the best selling EV in China.

And where is that model Y manufactured? Surely you're not suggesting that it's imported from the US.

If you consider Tesla in China to be Chinese, then BYD in EU would be Hungarian in the parent comment. Japanese brands also manufactures in Mexico, so Mazda is suddenly Mexican now? I've never seen anyone claiming such stuff, except when it comes to anything China.

Model Y remains American just like iPhone, regardless of where they are made. Nobody refers to iPhone as Chinese or Indian.

Made in Shanghai Gigafactory. Some may even argue Tesla would have died without the manufacture capacity in China

Are you saying USA is somehow a good example for environmental issues and human rights? Read the news in the past years?

Did you read the links I attached?

Are you saying China is better in human rights?

Read the news in the past few years?

>Are you saying China is better in human rights

Sadly, that's debatable these days.

But what are you trying to argue here? "America doesn't abuse it's workers as much so it's more ethical to buy american EVs that don't exist!"? We're objectively behind because so many EV lines were paused/cancelled last year

>Read the news in the past few years?

Yeah, I recommend doing that. We're going to have encyclopedia's dedicated to what's happening in the US in these last few years(and coming next few years).

>after factoring in harms they do to human rights and the environment

America c. 2025 and beyond has no leg to stand on in terms of espousing care of human rights and environment.

>even EU despite claiming to be morally superior to the US, heavily tariffs BYD (much more than the tariffs that the globe mocks Trump for).

You are technically correct... because Trump did not actually Tariff BYD directly. The 100% EV tariffs was a Biden era move, made to give American manufacturers time to develop their own EV solutions for the domestic market. Separate from whatever global tariffs Trump announced.

And then trump ended EV credits, and ultimately pushed the road down to American manufacturers giving up on their EV initiatives.