Bans in general don't have to be and rarely will be completely enforceable in all cases. But a ban with significant enough consequences would mean most businesses wouldn't think about trying them at some point, just to avoid the risk.
It isn't even as simple as banning copyrighted copies.
Weights are fungible.
I fine-tune an open weigh model and call it legit. Good luck for authorities to prove where the base model was from, or to prove a Tor connection a few months ago was fetching suspicious bytes.
Sure, and you could also go on Tor and buy all kinds of illegal things and they could have a hard time proving that you ordered them and not your arch nemesis to frame you. Banning those things won't stop 100% of people from buying and selling them, but it probably reduces the number who will. And more importantly, companies would be more risk averse on such a thing when they can just buy a similar product with no risk. They also will mostly avoid any GPL software entirely even though the risk there is a lawsuit from the FSF, which is a much less threatening thing than getting on the wrong side of the current US government.
> And more importantly, companies would be more risk averse on such a thing when they can just buy a similar product with no risk.
Not to mention that as enterprise demand for newly "illegal" LLMs dries up, so will the incentive for Chinese labs to shovel money into building them. I doubt Chinese labs are getting rich off providing inference to American business, but loosing them would be a permanent dent, along with rendering moot the perhaps more nefarious incentives Chinese labs have to release model weights in the first place.
Home construction information is publicly available, but it doesn’t mean you can add a room to your home without government approval, even if you do all the work yourself!
BTW - When was the last time you saw mentions of DeCSS?
