Export control as a concept isn’t new, but this a very new application of it. The ban seems to apply to all non-US citizens for a whole product version, not only one aspect of that product, or potentially even other versions of the same product.

The ban is also unlike cryptography in that this wasn’t a military tech with regulatory controls that began to be adopted by companies who knew there were restrictions. This is the reverse, a ban applied to a pre-existing application where there were notoriously no controls in place.

Anthropic has multiple offices internationally, so even if we put Karpathy aside for a moment, it would be an unbelievably complex task to silo off internal access and work allocation. It’s not like it’s a Netscape situation where they have to make sure the few people working with the RSA algorithm details are US citizens, and they have to ship a slightly nerfed fork alongside the US version, for a product that works entirely on a local single machine.

I’m certainly not angered by the situation, but it’s very clearly market manipulation with nonsensical justification, and far wider implications than just for Anthropic.