Ask HN: Model access depends on citizenship. What should Non-US founders do?

A South African AI startup founder on Hacker News raises concerns that frontier model access is being restricted based on citizenship, not company incorporation, citing Anthropic's nationality-based access controls and potential government gating of GPT-5.6. The founder asks how non-US teams can remain competitive as regional capability gaps widen, exploring options like open-weight models, non-US providers, or naturalizing as US citizens.

LLMs are at this point a necessity to develop large scale systems - we couldn't do what we do without them. Our team is worried by the developments of Mythos/Fable getting restricted and the news about GPT 5.6 access being gated by the government customer-by-customer. The part that complicates the obvious answers: the Anthropic directive keyed on the nationality of the person accessing the model, not where the company is incorporated; even their own foreign-national employees lost access. So "just flip to a Delaware C-corp" doesn't clearly solve it for a team like ours. This is all new and we don't think anyone has real answers yet. We want to hear what others think might work. A few directions we've floated, none of which we're sure about: - Hoping that at least one frontier model provider remains accessible - An open-weight/non-US floor GLM/DeepSeek/Qwen - Hoping for frontier access via Bedrock/Vertex/Azure rather than first-party APIs Our concern is that the regional capability difference gets worse over time. We'd all be happy to naturalize to US citizens, but is this even possible - and can we do so before the US compute lead combined with regional restrictions locks us out of being competitive in software production? What are we missing? How are other non-US national founded startups mitigating this emerging risk? Are we overestimating it or where could we be wrong? Context: South Africa, Pre-seed, SMB AI Software Infrastructure, 100% South African Team Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692825 Points: 1 Comments: 0