Almost 200 startups, led by new Little Tech Association, urge Trump not to ban Chinese open-weight AI models
- Nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, sent letters through the newly formed Little Tech Association urging Trump, Commerce Secretary Lutnick, and OSTP Director Kratsios not to restrict access to Chinese open-weight AI models.
- The push follows reports the administration was considering banning Chinese models after Moonshot AI released its Kimi K3 model, though two officials say a blanket ban was not seriously discussed at Monday night's White House and Cabinet meeting.
- Kratsios alleged Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Fable model at scale to build K3 and acquired banned Nvidia GB300 servers, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration could sanction companies over IP theft.
- Particle founder Suhail Doshi warned a ban would kill hundreds of startups instantly and mainly benefit incumbents like Anthropic, since founders would be forced onto pricier US model credits.
- The Commerce Department has not yet drafted plans to add Chinese AI firms to its Entity List, and the Little Tech Association's director called for "a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer" instead of broad prohibitions.
Hacker News 의견들
Under what legal authority could Trump even block access to these models in the first place?
Same authority he used for tariffs and starting a war, honestly. Rules just work differently for whoever the administration decides is an opponent that week.
He doesn't need new authority, ICE and similar agencies can make life legally miserable for any company that ends up on the radar, court orders or not.
Even if he can't technically shut it off, individuals can just VPN to Europe and grab the weights anyway.
Individuals sure, but the government can make hosting or integrating these models so legally risky for US corporations that AWS, Azure, GCP, HuggingFace and GitHub all drop them fast.
Wait, the article lists Proton among the 200 companies, but Proton is a Swiss non-profit in Geneva. Which Proton are they even talking about?
I'm archiving as much of HuggingFace as I can right now before anything gets pulled down, everyone should be doing the same.
Rather than hoarding Chinese weights, we should just pour more investment into US open models like OLMo so we're not dependent on this in the first place.
Calling it IP theft is peak hypocrisy, US AI companies train on unlimited copyrighted data with zero rights and no consequences, but Chinese labs get sanctioned for allegedly distilling.
It's not theft just because Kratsios says so, if the company is outside the US the courts have no jurisdiction anyway, so the government can basically just declare guilt and sanction.
Model weights should fall under free speech honestly, Bernstein v. US already established source code counts as expressive speech back in the 90s.
True in theory, but the government can still sanction cloud providers into refusing to host foreign open weight models, so in practice you'd only get them by pirating, and no business will touch that liability.
The US has no copyright claim on the training data it scraped in the first place, so crying about China stealing from the thieves rings pretty hollow to me.
I get that argument but it's different when it's a geopolitical rival doing large scale distillation against US models during an already tense period, that's a legitimate bipartisan concern.
How exactly do you even ban a set of numbers? It's like trying to ban pirated media from being downloaded, it just doesn't work effectively.