From Cryptography to Model Weights: The Fight for Open Access
Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights
Reflecting on the victory over cryptography export controls, I see history repeating with AI model restrictions. Governments are now limiting access to frontier models, binding defenders while determined attackers remain free. Just as the OpenBSD team bypassed old rules, new open-weight models from Mistral and DeepSeek are making export controls obsolete. The path to safety lies in open access, not restrictive barriers.
The determined will have the frontier. The rest of us are asked to go without, and told it is for our safety.
- aftbit
The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site.
As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally.
What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.
- deyiao
It's unfortunate that the final few years of the fastest AGI progress happen to coincide with a global surge in nationalism, polarization, and mutual hostility between human groups.
That raises a disturbing failure mode: under intense conflict, an AI could learn that exterminating some groups of humans is a justified or even desirable objective. Once that principle is accepted, the step to concluding that exterminating all humans is justified may become much smaller than we'd like to believe.
- jameshart
Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.
Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.
- heisenbit
The difference with weights is that unlike in the past one can not fit the secrets on a T shirt print.
- no_multitudes
It seems like you got bored halfway through and had an LLM write the second half of your post? You know there isn't a minimum length for blog posts, right? You can just stop writing.
- aetherspawn
It’s kind of a bit ridiculous for Opus to blow up the minute I ask it to read from Ghidra, when the Chinese models, and even OpenAI, do not.
Leave the legality up to me, please, and don’t presume to be a power tool vendor regulating the use of their power drills, so to speak.
- bonoboTP
This is AI written. Next time just paste your prompt or conversation with the AI that wrote the article. I'll then converse with Claude about it myself. There is no need for this intermediary.
- theturtletalks
We need a cypherpunks movement for open weight models