AIWatch.

On the one hand, such restrictions would signal that the perceived threat from China has grown so significant that policymakers now fear Chinese models could undermine the competitive position of US frontier labs. Pulling the emergency brake would send a powerful message to the rest of the world: China has become a serious technological competitor.

On the other hand, such a ban would be extremely difficult to enforce. While the primary focus would likely be on commercial deployment, procurement, and hosting, preventing access to downloadable model weights altogether would be nearly impossible.

More fundamentally, open development is one of the foundations of modern technology. The internet, Linux, and countless other innovations were built through open collaboration. Restricting access to powerful models may protect US companies in the short term, but it could weaken the broader innovation ecosystem that made today’s technological progress possible in the first place.