Updating Restrictions of Sales to Unsupported Regions
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
anthropic.comTechstory
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AI RegulationExport ControlsGeopolitics
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AI Regulation
Export Controls
Geopolitics
Anthropic announces restrictions on sales to unsupported regions, sparking debate on the effectiveness of such measures in preventing access by adversarial nations like China.
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Should I set up the company now and rake in the billions?
So? I'll still have those few millions.[1]
Besides, how will they know? Creating a new proxy account for every real account would make it almost impossible for Anthropic to know that someone is coming from China, only that some set of accounts (say, 100k) are coming in from a small set of IPs, but they're still paid accounts!
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[1] The idea is probably DoA for other reasons, such as why would someone proxy through you when they can use a VPN. Or openrouter.
You almost certainly agree when paying for Anthropic not to do this, so they’ll sue you for those few million
They don't accept the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the Republic of Congo is OK. There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one.
Anthropic is fine with Taiwan.
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries (They give two lists, one for API and another for Claude.ai, but the lists are identical.)
Similar to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and People’s Republic of China, hmm.
(West Germany was the Federal Republic of Germany.)
Yeah, I'm sure whatever restrictions they put in place will make it so hard for Chinese entities to access their APIs.
This is simply an attempt by Anthropic to pretend to play nice with the current administration (and to be clear, I don't blame them - let's just not pretend that this actually prevents China getting access to Anthropic).
Ah, right, China, the only country which actually releases open weight frontier models. Anthropic definitely doesn't want Chinese companies to use their APIs because of their commitment to "advance democratic interests", and not because they want to prevent them from distilling their models and releasing them for free for everyone to use. Definitely. Fortunately since this use case is already breaking the TOS I doubt any extra legal maneuvering is going to stop anyone.