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

#581

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 8:57 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…

[deleted]

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

#582

Post by brendoelfrendo » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #475

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 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…

Which is kind of weird, imo. Shouldn't increased competition spur increased investment? If your competitor's product is approaching or beating yours on some metric, isn't the answer to improve your product to differentiate it from the competition? To say that open weight models will stop the flow of capital seems to indicate one of two things: 1) the frontier labs have no idea how to compete, so they are giving up; or 2) they figure that investors will eventually shrug and say "eh, the open weight stuff is good enough, no need to do more research," and retreat from the industry altogether. In the former case, it makes sense to lobby for regulation because the alternative is failure. In the latter, it's an admission that their product has no differentiating qualities from any other in the category and the product is more like a commodity or a utility and not a machine to print infinite wealth.

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

#583

Post by andix » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #357

Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models? Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to p…

Just declare it illegal (national security risks). Treat it like sexual abuse material, scan cloud services for copies, and jail everyone who has them.

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

#584

Post by hax0ron3 » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

GlickWick wrote: post #98

guax wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might wanna reflect on who’s threatening hot war lately.

The main actors threatening (and delivering) a hot war are China, and by proxy, Russia. The Ukraine war is absolutely and transparently enabled by China, who is also trying to actively destabilize the EU and the US in order to make its conquest of Taiwan more likely. Yes, the US has an idiot in charge who is threatening these things in response, too. However, unlike China, the electorate does not support him. His ele…

>However, unlike China, the electorate does not support him. His election is also almost certainly due to aggressive campaigns to destabilize the US internally for this exact purpose.

What are you claiming here?

That China hacked the voting systems enough to swing the election? I know of no good evidence of this.

That China changed voters' minds enough to swing the election? But then "the electorate does not support him" does not follow. If I change your voting choice using some kind of non-coercive persuasion such as by making an argument, your support for your new choice is still genuine support. It doesn't matter if my argument was good quality or not, what my country of origin is, or even whether I lied about my motives in making the argument.

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

#585

Post by porridgeraisin » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #540

porridgeraisin wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is not clear that "model self-hosting in Fortune companies is DOA". Among the chiefs of the Fortune companies there is no complete unity, as some think that they should receive some of the AI profits, instead of OpenAI and Anthropic. Recently, both the CEO of Palantir and then the CEO of Microsoft have criticized quite harshly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic, implying that it is bad both for society and…

Oh yeah I've been seeing the nadella posts on twitter, which I presume are aimed at those reporting to him primarily. Agreed on them and palantir. But even if that is the case I believe the risk due the "soft regulations" I mentioned above and the lucrative customers being government or major government contractors would mean them using openai/anthropic models maybe on a separate on-prem deployment or existing government azure deployments. My statement as phrased was too strong I responded to a picture in my head of JPMC deploying open source models using their own tech team.

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

#586

Post by satvikpendem » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

fbrncci wrote: post #543

Living outside of the US (and EU). I’m in the process of launching an agent assisted automated pentesting and authorized offensive security service. I’m using open weights models to execute the entire audit. So lets for a moment entertain the idea that the US somehow locks open weights. How are they going to stop such audits or actual attackers? A competing service in the US simple won’t be able to execute the same l…

They can put you on an entity list as mentioned, but their general goal is not to target you or other small businesses but rather larger companies. They don't care about what you do.

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

#587

Post by nilkn » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:04 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…

You're not seeing it because you're thinking in terms of internal US economics, but this is a question about international economics and geopolitical leverage in the distant future.

The reason to consider the ban is because it might be the only way to preserve a fully autonomous and independent American frontier AI stack and the long-term strategic value of possessing such a stack could vastly outweigh the cost of giving up true free market competition on AI. If giving US startups and other companies access to cheaper Chinese AI means sacrificing the US's ability to own its own frontier AI stack, is that a rational trade, or would it severely and irrecoverably sacrifice the country's technological autonomy and leverage for decades to come in exchange for cheaper tokens for a little bit early on?

If the US not only gives up most of its manufacturing capability to China, but also allows itself to give up its own AI stack and become almost entirely dependent on foreign AI, then it's conceivable the combination of the two sacrifices will deal a permanent deathblow to the country in exchange for what will turn out to have been a couple decades of cheap goods and AI tokens.

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

#588

Post by dmuso » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #357

Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models? Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to p…

Probably in a similar way to how they go after IP/copyright currently. One method they use is to push for law changes in free trade agreements. US would use whatever leverage they have to get other countries on board and locked in to US providers.

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

#589

Post by throw1234567891 » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

gaws wrote: post #528

throw1234567891 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will come for you too, fool. You obviously have no fucking clue what’s the deal with open-weight models. Can I run Fable on my computer? No. Can I run Depseek 4 or glm5.2 on my computer? Yes.

> It will come for you too, fool. Thankfully, I'm not in a position in which any of this will negatively impact me. But, please, keep seething.

Proverbial “you”. You laugh, hopefully your leg doesn’t slip before it truly does not matter anymore.

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

#590

Post by kube-system » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

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

A "ban" is a legal prohibition. The possibility of the ban is solely a legal decision. Open weights might make it easy to violate a ban, but it does absolutely nothing to prevent one from being possible. The questions as to whether a ban would be effective hinges entirely on the ability and desire to enforce it.