Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#511

Post by porridgeraisin » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

capevace wrote: post #482

porridgeraisin wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will not actually shut it down. Rather, they will simply continually posture in that direction and release a statement that the wrong lawyer can interpret the wrong way. This will make it a soft no-no for anyone involved in government procurement which is most big companies thus ensuring american AI companies have the market, while also ensuring startups, etc still have access to the structurally lower-cost chin…

> In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason But the argument isn’t about model providers tho right (providing inference)? Using Chinese providers is already a privacy problem if user data is involved, so I don’t know if anything would change here. What you’re suggesting is that the policy would stop big co‘s from running thei…

Nothing will be truly banned. As in, you can always run and use all the chinese models. Startups will use them. Like I said, they will simply use soft regulations to ensure that all the major players who due to power law will form a majority of the economy, will be using OAI/Ant. If JP Morgan wants to run their own Deepseek V4 on their own hardware, why would the US government care? They simply don't want them using chinese model providers. That is all. However, today, the fact of the matter is that frontier model self-hosting in Fortune companies is DOA, everyone is using APIs. I am not saying this can never change in the future, but seeing past trends, people don't even host their own frikkin source control, so I find it hard to believe JPMC is going to host Deepseek V7 or whatever. You might, and I might, but only the top few thousand mega enterprise deals matter economically speaking. Doordash using qwen for dish classification is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (which is not to say it won't be profitable for alibaba).

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#512

Post by hnfong » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #11

SubiculumCode wrote: post #2

Not in Trump's power.

If he can ban Chinese TikTok for alleged national security reasons, I'm sure he can also similarly ban Chinese AI.

That said, it's harder to ban a terabyte of floating point numbers under a MIT license.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

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Post by IncreasePosts » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

capevace wrote: post #350

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be? 1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models? 2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway 3. it’s not stopping distil…

The point would be to not allow (mostly) Chinese agencies to profit from the American market by ripping off (mostly) American frontier models.

Just like unlicensed dupes of designer goods can be intercepted at the border.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

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Post by cdata » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

temporalparts wrote: post #506

GodelNumbering wrote: post #281

Proprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses. I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.

Setting aside the strict definition of IP, this does satisfy the philosophical motivation of IP, which is to protect people making significant capital investments. This is not too different from drug discovery where it's extremely difficult to come up with the molecule, but relatively easy to copy it. Similarly, it's really hard to create frontier models from scratch but much easier to distill them.

I'm all for framing the spirit this way, so long as we recognize that it was rather difficult to come up with the sum total of human creative output (noting also that approximately zero of the cost to produce it has been born by frontier labs so far).

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#515

Post by andriy_koval » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

capevace wrote: post #499

didibus wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech mig…

> thus capping how far the tech could reach I just don’t buy it. There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models. Sure growth will be slower, but this might even drive a push for more cost efficient training / inference and/or new architectures if money is harder to come by.

> There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models.

potential issue is those will be Chinese models if they win, which could be national security matter.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#516

Post by frollogaston » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #463

Blocking Chinese models would just be regulatory capture by another name. If we want OpenAI and Anthropic to improve they need to compete not just with eachother but with foreign labs too. I don’t know why anyone would think giving Mango Mussolini the power to decide what AI models they can use is a good idea.

It's not really a competition with the foreign labs cause they're copying. To illustrate the difference, if there were somehow an impenetrable firewall between the US and China, the US models would continue improving while the Chinese ones don't.

The only solution is for US labs to find a way to not get copied, and idk how. Banning Chinese models doesn't help with that.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#517

Post by lelanthran » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #268

jgbuddy wrote: post #78

The point of open weight models is that this is not possible, companies will be built by taking 'contraband' chinese open weight models and marketing as something from the US

Without a massive amount of post-training, it will be obvious that they are Chinese models with Chinese political ideology. I doubt that there's any business model that would work there.

> Without a massive amount of post-training,

I don't think so; ISTR some LoRA thing on hugging-face that easily overrode the Tiannamen Square related weights in a previous gen GLM.

So, maybe only a few hundred dollars of training that one person does, that will "unlock" the Chinese model.

> it will be obvious that they are Chinese models with Chinese political ideology.

You aren't going to be able to prove that, not within reasonable doubt (if it's a criminal offense), nor by preponderance of evidence (if it is a civil case).

You are looking at products wrapping the popular models (i.e. moonshot, z.ai, etc) - the wrapper is doing the heavy lifting of providing guardrails. Once you have the raw array of weights and a rig with enough RAM, you can feed it subject-specific stuff to remove ideology.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#518

Post by lowbloodsugar » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #427

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just outing yourself as someone who is a slave to meaningless numbers. Do you think side gigs are reported? You quote unemployment numbers without admitting that people who have given up or simple failed to land a job are not included in those numbers. The numbers are gamed. Feel free to keep showing us who you are.

> Do you think side gigs are reported? Yes. The FRED data includes informal employment. They do months and months of exhaustive surveys all of the country to put together their data. > You quote unemployment numbers without admitting that people who have given up or simple failed to land a job are not included in those numbers. No, I included data about labor force participation, which is only down a little. > The nu…

I mean, everything you just said is trivially refutable with just Google. FRED data isn’t the governments unemployment figures. FRED data relies on people to self report their side gigs that they aren’t paying taxes on? It is a known gap.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#519

Post by barbazoo » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

Matl wrote: post #354

capevace wrote: post #350

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be? 1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models? 2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway 3. it’s not stopping distil…

> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it. > The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking Amer…

I find such beauty in the fact that the robbers are getting robbed but it's all part of progress overall. It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#520

Post by treyd » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

capevace wrote: post #350

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be? 1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models? 2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway 3. it’s not stopping distil…

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

This is exactly it.

Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (without a complicated process) because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands that our domestic brands couldn't compete and lobbied to keep them out.

> should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return?

It just has to last until the next quarter / fundraising round.