The fact that a VPN can violate these laws is a well-known issue and it is being attacked from various angles depending on the country.
They may not all be using a liability trap like Utah but it isn't as if the rest of the world are passing similar age verification laws and accepting that anybody who can download and install a VPN can ignore the law.
So the US continues to encourage businesses to operate elsewhere. Tired of winning yet?
That argument only works if there are significant markets where a country could choose to operate that wouldn't impose the same verification restrictions.
As of today a large amount of countries, representing around 4.5 billion people including the largest economies in the world are pushing for some sort of age verification requirement.
You could choose to operate outside of these countries but you would only find a small, and poor, market. The countries pushing for this kind of identity verification account for the majority of the world's GDP.
So, as it stands, unless you want to operate an e-commerce business serving Gabon and Congo, you would probably be forced to comply with a law similar to the one in Utah.
Utah can charge me with whatever the fuck they want. If I’m not in Utah or doing business with Utah and ignore them what are they doing to do about it?
If you live in the US then the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which is enforced with under 28 U.S.C. § 1738, requires that all states recognize and enforce valid final judgements from sister states.
If Utah sues you for violating this law you could show up to court to contest the case or they would win a default judgement.
After the State had a judgement they could seek a writ of execution or writ of garnishment to seize your wages or put liens on your properties.
If you don't live in the US, and don't plan to ever work or own property in the US then you're functionally immune to such judgements.
“My bill to stop AI from telling kids to kill themselves just passed out of committee UNANIMOUSLY,” Hawley wrote on X. “No amount of profit justifies the DESTRUCTION of our children. Time to bring this bill to the Senate floor.”
"PROTECT OUR CHILDREN" - the cry of people who are trying to do something incredibly bad and want to immediately shut down criticism.
If they were worried about AI telling kids to kill themselves, they could just make it illegal for AI to tell ANYONE to kill themselves. That seems like a pretty common sense law without any serious privacy implications.
Conceptually what you're describing is feasible, there's lots of distributed computing projects that borrow compute/space/bandwidth for their ends but is unlikely to have any practical use.
If there were a distributed system that could be used as memory in a large virtual inferencing machine, it would be incredibly slow. The model would be stored across a large number of different computers which would all have to coordinate. Each step of inferencing would be orders of magnitude slower because the latency between two different computers is orders of magnitude slower than the latency between a GPU and physical RAM.
On the other end, if we just assume inferencing is feasible in reasonable time through some technique that isn't public... a model that was large enough to take advantage of an Internet worth of memory doesn't exist.
So, assuming you had access to the largest model that we know of, you would have a model as complex as Claude Opos, but would take hours or days to respond finish inferencing and the quality would be about the same as you could get in under a second for $20/mo.
And, going with a hypothetical 'Internet Scale' model.
First, it would have to be trained which would use take an incredibly long time. Some of these frontier models take months to train on the fastest hardware available, a larger model would take even longer to train due to the increased latency.
More importantly, there are strong diminishing returns on capability vs model size. This is why the AI companies are focusing on agentic tasks, where the AI spends a lot of time talking to itself and using tools, rather than pushing for a model with more parameters. This is referred to as the "scaling wall" (though AI companies, for obvious reasons, deny that such a thing exists and smoking companies say there's no cancer risk for smokers).
It's a neat idea (Skynet may be loose on the world, hiding out as widespread 'bugs' that happen to consume a lot of resources and compute), but it would require a lot of things to be magic'd into existence to be remotely practical.
The EU is doing ID verification too, it's essentially bifurcating the Internet into the new 'We know exactly who you are' Internet and the old, possibly soon to be outlawed, wild wild west Internet that we're on today where you can remain pseudoanonymous.
This was top of the line around 2010. So in consumer tech terms: Apple's A7 SoC (iPhone 5S, iPad Air), Intel Sandy Bridge/AMD Bristol Ridge and DDR3 RAM .
They have better machines in production, they just cannot manufacturer them domestically. Using those machines they're producing:
14nm (2014-2019 era, Intel Broadwell-Coffee Lake, Ryzen 1000/2000, DDR4), Mass produced by SMIC
7nm (2018-2021, Apple A12/A13, AMD Ryzen 3000/5000, faster DDR4), Limited production at SMIC
5nm (2020-2023 iPhone 12-15, AMD Zen4, DDR5-4800), currently in development/low yields ~20%
They do not have any EUV (sub-5nm) capacity domestically.
China isn't that far behind current generation chips and most people are probably using devices with 14/7nm chips in them due to the AI bubble eating up all of the newest process chips and driving prices out of reach of consumers.
The mass data sharing is the core issue. We're collectively creating a power that nobody should have and yet it's available for subscription without any regulations.
The fact that a VPN can violate these laws is a well-known issue and it is being attacked from various angles depending on the country.
They may not all be using a liability trap like Utah but it isn't as if the rest of the world are passing similar age verification laws and accepting that anybody who can download and install a VPN can ignore the law.