US weighs curbs on Chinese open weights; 179 startups push back
A proposed rule could pull DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi off US builders’ shelves — models many adopted this week. Founders warn hundreds of firms would die.
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The rule that could clear your model shelf
The Trump administration is weighing restrictions on Chinese open-weight models — DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi K3 among them. Nothing is final, but a US curb would hit exactly the cheap, self-hostable models many builders now lean on.
179 founders signed the “don’t” letter
The Little Tech Association — 179 US companies — wrote to President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging against a ban. Particle founder Suhail Doshi warned “there’ll be hundreds of companies that instantly die.”
The weights don’t vanish — your access does
A US-only ban leaves DeepSeek and Qwen freely downloadable everywhere else, so it wouldn’t slow China — it would just price US startups out of the cheapest near-frontier open models while overseas rivals keep building on them. Worth wiring a Western open-weight fallback like GLM or Mistral now.