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> “The source described leading AI labs or their allies approaching the administration every 3-5 months with an idea to ban open-source models.”

That's going to hit first amendment grounds pretty quick, the same way that software in general did.

The modern version of the decss flag will be a character that says "I think good weights are {...weights go here...}"

They could, however, ban any payment to a chinese entity, or any entity owned by a chinese entity for inference/ai services/etc

 help



There are already plenty of [illegal numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number).

We have numbers that you can't possess without proper license/authorization, and numbers that you can't yell at a crowded movie theater.


So what if some numbers are effectively illegal? the probability that the number that happened to correspond to some CSAM image collides with numbers worth sharing and thus propagating (like pi, euler's constant, ...; no substrings don't count!) is effectively nihil: the probability that a 100 bit number collides with a specific useful number in literature, mathematics, ... is 1 vs : 2 ^ 100 (or roughly a 1 followed by 30 zeros); in others words astronomically small. Even multiplying all human communications (text messages, books, articles, ...) with the average number of numbers appearing per communication (resulting in the total number of communicated numbers) multiplied by the 1 on the left hand side of the ratio doesn't move the needle, its still astronomically small.

In other words when someone sends you a number that happens to render to CSAM material, its not a coincidence, and any sender pretending it to be coincidence is molesting statistics as well...

Furthermore your "precedent" of illegal numbers is a poor precedent: unlike the tiny fraction of numbers criminalized, all the other numbers remain perfectly legal in stark contrast to big tech proposing to ban all open weight models (!)

Casually dropping in bijections between numbers and images and CSAM images hence CSAM numbers is pure whataboutism that risks ignoring the grave consequences of a ban on open-weight models.

Physics is models. Shall we blanket ban open-source physics?

Hey let's just be silly and casually behave laissez faire when big tech proposes banning open-weight models, because someone has already banned your favorite numbers??!

BTW anyone that follows up with: "hey you only multiplied the appearances of random numbers appearing in communications for a single specific CSAM image, what about the birthday paradox, multiple images are CSAM" don't worry I got you more than covered: 100 bits is not enough to encode a CSAM image worth writing to the police about. An average image easily consumes thousands of bits (or many times more), making the exact number of CSAM images/numbers irrelevant.


That's going to hit first amendment grounds pretty quick, the same way that software in general did

Don't count on that. "National security" == the cheat code for the US court system that instantly bypasses any First Amendment issues.



That was also a very different SCOTUS bench.

I'm in this timeline where SCOTUS did not rule on Bernstein

Was it before or after the Federalist Society and other political actors successfully placed a lot of unqualified judges on the lower courts?

Looks like Bernstein wasn't even a Supreme Court bench, the government loosened regs rather than appealing.

Whether or not a Trump admin would do the same is wildly difficult to predict. On one hand, Republican security hawks influence. On a similar hand, big US business interests. On the other hand, OTHER big US business interest. On yet another hand, some not-exactly-particularly-favored companies like Anthropic pushing for it.

If it made it to the Supreme Court it's not hard to see Gorsuch and Robert or another going for the "free speech" vs "security" reading here along with the 3 appointees of Democratic presidents, especially with no single clear US business interest or precedent there.


Uh, how big would such a flag have to be?

With a small enough font, about two American Eagles high, and four to five across.

This is where the next wave of lossless ultra-compression comes in - but I believe in Claude Shannon so that’s unlikely.




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