Nearly 200 startups urge Trump not to ban Chinese open-weight AI models

Nearly 200 venture-backed startups, organized as the newly formed Little Tech Association, sent a letter on July 22 urging President Trump to reject a blanket ban on Chinese open-weight AI models.

The letter answers a competing push. OpenAI and Anthropic have jointly warned US policymakers about risks from powerful Chinese open-weight models, among them Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s Qwen, whose weights are freely downloadable and can be run and modified by anyone. The startups, backed by Y Combinator and the encrypted-services company Proton, called instead for “targeted safeguards” rather than a broad prohibition.

The stakes are cost and survival for smaller firms that build on these models as lower-priced alternatives to US systems. Suhail Doshi, founder of the startup Particle, said “there’ll be hundreds of companies that instantly die” if such models were banned.

The White House played down the prospect. It called reports of a pending blanket ban “baseless speculation,” and a broad prohibition was reportedly not seriously considered among senior officials, leaving the letter aimed partly at a policy that may never arrive.

Still, the split matters: two of the largest AI labs are lobbying for restrictions that many smaller developers say would cut off their supply of affordable models. Whether the administration lands on narrow controls or holds off entirely will show whose framing of open-weight AI wins in Washington.