Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedNathan Labenz: belief
14 Aug 2026 The Cognitive Revolution Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses
“I guess another simple argument is that I think our frontier companies are doing just fine. That, you know, that could change perhaps at some point in time, and I you know, as the facts change, I I think our response to it, you know, might also ought to change.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Nathan Labenz
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 14 Aug 2026
- Publisher
- The Cognitive Revolution
Transcript context
…I think we do want the the deck stacked against China. We don't want China to win the race to ASI. I I'm not a lawyer, so I won't opine on the exact legal path that you may take to to make your terms of service in full. So I I'll just observe that, and I say that as someone who used to work at Uber. It's extremely hard to bring justice through the judiciary against Chinese companies. Almost impossible. So not a lawyer. I don't understand the technicalities here, but I'll just observe and start with that. And it may take a very long time, and by then, a lot of damage is done. And then I'll also observe, like, yes, companies are training on all of these corpus that is available to everyone. That is an an even playing field. The problem is that once you've done that at at great expense, it does cost them billions of dollars. If you can if you can and you and you create that artifact out of this training dataset, which is called the model. Now other people can turn around, and and instead of doing this, which cost billions of dollars, they turn to this, which cost a lot less than that, and they copy you and they catch up with you. If you do that, you kill innovation. And that's that's it's nothing new. It's just called IP and patent law. It's exactly what humans do. Right? It's like you as a human. You're like a researcher. You you think for, like, decades. You do all of that work because you're lot of money in r and d. You come up with an idea which is much smaller in tokens and much more precious and much cheaper to steal as is than, like, all the corpus of stuff that you trained on, how do you protect that idea in order to recoup your investment, in order to produce it? It's called a patent. It's called IP. Right? It's nothing new. If you apply to the same standard you're applying now to, for example, the pharma industry, you will have very cheap drugs, which is awesome, and you would have no new drug ever. You would completely destroy innovation in the pharma industry. And I think this is why you're finding all of these people support open models because people like free stuff. And it's it's you can't really measure the the future innovation that you don't get as a result of that. All you see is you get free models. You know? And look. I'm one of them. You know? So I'm I'm I'm speaking against my interests here. Right? Like, my company is dependent economically on those, like, very, very, very cheap models. But I'm also in in a coordination problem right now because, like, I cannot not adopt these models while the models are out there because my competitors are going to do it. So I have to adopt them if they're out there. I wish they will forbidden across the board so that we would like like the four reasons I invoked earlier. Like, protect our our like, champions, not have the CCP, like, influence the country or run parts of the country and and have, a fair level field of of competition. I guess another simple argument is that I think our frontier companies are doing just fine. That, you know, that could change perhaps at some point in time, and I you know, as the facts change, I I think our response to it, you know, might also ought to change. But I don't find it super compelling at the moment to say, you know, we need to protect, like, Anthropics revenue run rate. Like, they're you know? Right. They can probably serve the models. The load. No. That's fair. They That's fair.…
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