The Looming Closure of China’s AI Frontier by Ryan Fedasiuk at American Enterprise Institute

Recent open-source AI releases have crossed an important threshold of disruptive capability. On September 29, Anthropic reported that Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 approached the capability of its Mythos model at certain tasks related to cyber exploitation. Like Anthropic had done with Mythos, Z.ai at first delayed the release of GLM-5.3 to provide time to shore up cyber defenses.

But since August 28, the model has been out in the wild—its weights are freely downloadable on HuggingFace—with built-in safeguards that can be easily bypassed with creative prompting or removed altogether through a process coined “abliteration.” Some commentators have speculated this model may have been the one used to develop “WeWorm,” a critical exploit, first reported in September, capable of reaching the 800 million users of China’s most popular messaging app. […]

Beijing has ample reason to keep promoting widely available AI. Xi Jinping personally endorsed China’s open-source leadership at the World AI Conference in July. TC260’s governance framework is notably “nonbinding” and explicitly endorses an open-source AI ecosystem. But these priorities can coexist with restrictions on more dangerous capabilities—and we are likely to see these restrictions manifest soon. The likely outcome is a bifurcation in Chinese strategy: continued diffusion at the low end of the AI value chain, with Chinese labs increasingly withholding systems that Beijing regards as threats to social stability or state control.

Given sufficiently advanced cyber capabilities, I’d expect restrictions on open-weight models to become hard to avoid. There are already calls for this in the U.S. It will be interesting to see how this plays out constitutionally. My concern is that, given the national security implications, courts might rethink the First Amendment protections that now extend to code and data from cases like Bernstein and Sorrell. That could knock over a lot of the 30-plus years of ‘code is speech’ precedent. OCT 6 | REPLY