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The US labs would lose billions in enterprise contracts if they were found to be secretly training on data when opted-out. It's not worth it.

Great in theory, but what are US enterprises going to do _if_ their private data is later found to be used for training?

1. Not use AI technology and fall behind the rest of the world.

2. Use Chinese AI technology, either hosted by Chinese companies or the models self-hosted.

3. Sue US AI companies for damages, but not enough to have any meaningful impact to such companies that it'd impact US national security goals (per US government contribution to NY Times copyright lawsuit).


3. They would sue. And it could have very meaningful impact. NYTimes copyright lawsuit is not a valid comparison because because that's a violation of national/state law which really only matters to the extent that the government is enforcing that stuff which is not the biggest concern rn (these companies are large enough that the threat of the legal costs of fighting in court is not that scary and you'd need a government actually willing to punish them substantially for them to be scared). This stuff would be under contract law against other mega corporations with big legal teams who are also their customers which is a much scarier prospect imo

I somewhat agree, but with limitations:

1. Possible use of differential privacy[1] techniques to train on private data but prevent the release of statistically underpresented facts/data/words. For example, ACME Inc's private data could frequently include the term 'ACMEwidgetPRO' for an upcoming product that is not publicly revealed anywhere else. It would therefore be a bad day for the AI technology company to output 'ACMEwidgetPRO' from one of their public models. Consider now that a few models could be trained--X for public data only, Y for public and private data of ACME Inc together, Z for private data of ACME Inc. A prompt is provided to model Y but output is cross-checked with model X to double check terms such as 'ACMEwidgetPRO' are known in public. If not--provide a "I don't know" response for the prompt.

2. Possible attempted defences similar to "Oops, our model was fine tuned against a model supplied by Temporary18271 Inc (company that no longer exists) and perhaps their model might have been trained on a non-public document which was accidentally exposed to the Internet" that _might_ work occasionally to fob off concern.

3. What recourse does a small or medium company or government especially in a developing country realistically have? They perhaps can't host their own LLMs locally due to availability and cost, can't individually negotiate their own favourable terms with an AI technology company (who cares that much about a potential customer with $100k budget that has no other options anyway), and perhaps can't remain competitive in their industry without heavy use of LLMs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy


Yes - but those aren't limitations beyond what I was getting at that's all part of the package of the bland dystopia of late 2026. I think 1 is just a case where it comes down to who has the better lawyers, as is 2. And for 3, yes, also a large government does not have much recourse if they have decided to not flex their muscles. Pretty much the only threat I see as actually viable/scary in this world environment is along the lines of megacorp v megacorp or megacorp v broligarch - and everyone else is just caught in the cross hairs/benefits by accident at best. It would be difficult to argue that the current environment is conducive to consumer protections or equal justice under law.

There's a huge difference between AI companies exploiting a grey area like training on public corpora and violating a private contract that they explicitly entered into with another party. The latter is very explicitly illegal and would never survive trial in Delaware Chancery court. And all of that is before we get into Federal contracts where training on TS/SCI data could lead to criminal charges.

There's a huge market in the US for providing AI services while respecting client privacy. It makes sense for at least one major provider to offer this.


> Great in theory, but what are US enterprises going to do _if_ their private data is later found to be used for training?

This. And it’s already happening:

> 2. Use Chinese AI technology, either hosted by Chinese companies or the models self-hosted.


> Sue US AI companies for damages

Yes that's the whole point, at least it's an option in the US and Europe. Good luck getting any redress from China. Anthropic was already hit with a $1.5B class-action which would be impossible against a Chinese business.


Oh. Yeah of course… and the US population will revolt if the figure the NSA is spying on them.

You can't compare a subscription to API prices. OpenCode Go is massively subsidised. Unlike the closed labs, we can say that for sure because we can see what they're paying for their tokens.

Enterprise, and APIs

aka the good Naomi

“If your Naomi is Klein, then it’s green…”

There is no definition of "native British", just as is the case for most of Europe. The "native" population has changed repeatedly for thousands of years. This isn't like America where there was a native population that was largely displaced in the past 400 years

Being displaced has nothing to do with native or not native. If nobody ever got displaced and there was just a small minority of European-descended Americans concentrated in one place, the common understanding of which ones are the native Americans wouldn't change.

The fact that the native population of Britain changed repeatedly thousands of years ago doesn't seem very relevant either. Are you saying that if new evidence showed that the native populations of America or Australia were the result of multiple ancient waves of migration rather than just one, that would change anyone's mind on which ones are truly the native Americans or Australians? That's obviously absurd.

If you really want to turn this apparently simple discussion about the common meaning of words into a matter of first-principles definitions, I guess I could give it a try, and it would probably have to bring in things like whether the waves of migration retained a significant identification with their place of origin. But it seems totally unnecessary.


> if new evidence showed that the native populations of America or Australia were the result of multiple ancient waves of migration rather than just one, that would change anyone's mind on which ones are truly the native Americans or Australians?

Not if they were truly ancient because they would still all have been there tens of thousands of years.

If you can find a still distinct pre-Columbian group who migrated to the Americas in the last millennium or two I would agree they are not an indigenous population.

> The fact that the native population of Britain changed repeatedly thousands of years ago

Not changed repeatedly thousands of years ago. kept changing repeatedly all the last few thousand years. Britsh history simply makes it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous, so any definition of native has to be very different from the American one, and will be a lot less clear cut and impossible to reach a consensus on. I would expect quite a few Welsh people to argue that the English are not indigenous.

One of the British politicians who DHH likes quoted stats about the number of people in the country who are not ethnically white British. The definition he used classifies people like the King and Winston Churchill as not British. He became very evasive when ashed about this in an interview https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/07/rupert-lowe-rest...


>If you can find a still distinct pre-Columbian group who migrated to the Americas in the last millennium or two I would agree they are not an indigenous population.

That's not really what the argument is about, it's about whether such a group would invalidate the concept of "native American" entirely such that it wouldn't be meaningful to distinguish between the native Americans or the non-native European Americans. That's effectively what you're arguing for Britain, and it's absurd.


Its not what I am arguing at all

What are you arguing then?

>Britsh history simply makes it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous

Taking the example of the Normans that you mentioned somewhere else in the thread, what's the difference between them and your hypothetical pre-Columbian group? Why does the Normans make it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous when another migration wave arrives, while the hypothetical pre-Columbians don't?


I am arguing there is no clear break at which you can reach a consensus.

Suppose groups that had reached the Americas before Columbus, such as the Norse, probably Polynesians, possibly others, had settled in large numbers instead of just a fleeting contact, and that had happened repeatedly since the first peopling of the Americas, and some of the groups had merged with earlier groups, and some had not, then how would you define a native American?

This is exactly what you have in the UK. I notice you have ignored my comment asking you to provide a clear definition of native British. Given that most saves of immigration to the UK have merged into existing populations do specify how much of people's ancestry needs to be whatever you call "native" for it to count.


>then how would you define a native American?

In the context of the wave of post-1492 European migration to America, I would define it to mean as anyone who isn't coming from that specific migration wave. It would remain easy, so long as the specific migration wave is still easy to distinguish from the the others.

You're now saying explicitly that if some new archeological evidence showed multiple waves of Polynesians in large numbers, then you would suddenly have trouble defining the distinction between a native American and an European in the post-1492 context, but this still seems completely absurd to me. So I'm afraid I don't really know what you're talking about.

The point that I was making is that this is the "definition" I would use for Britain as well, when discussing a very specific phenomenon of modern migration into Britain. Anyone who was there before the modern wave counts as native. As with all attempted formal definitions of real world phenomena, you can keep digging at and asking whether e.g. the Polish or Irish waves of immigration are distinct from the "current" ones that people are talking about. But there shouldn't be any doubts about the Normans 1000 years ago any more than there would be about the hypothetical Polynesians.


> Politics is really not that serious

Really?


I heard you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem

Brilliant :). Since this is currently going to woosh for younger visitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Great! I thought it was about this, and you saved me the time to look for the exact comment. Wow, 19 years ago... Time really flies.

And in the meantime, every site in the world gets hacked. It takes far longer to fix every vulnerability than it does to find one unpatched one. Mythos has led to huge numbers of reported vulnerabilities on every kind of software. If those were all dropped as zero days (which is effectively what an open weight model would do), attackers can choose an unpatched on at their leisure while defenders race to fix them all and update everything.

> A usage agreement between two private companies is not considered public access.

Says who? Just write the law so it is.

> Under your current definition, Mythos is currently in public access.

Yes


Those are not incompatible. He can still be one of the most hated people on the planet, even if lots of people like him. The same would apply to all of the most hated people in history.

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