US Leans Toward Targeted Bans on Chinese Open-Weight Models as Meta and Mistral Push Back
The Trump administration reportedly favors banning specific Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 rather than a blanket restriction, while Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Nvidia and Replit sign an open letter warning against broad open-weight curbs.
The Trump administration is reportedly leaning toward targeted bans on specific Chinese open-weight models such as Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and DeepSeek's V4, rather than a blanket restriction on the category, according to a New York Times report cited July 26. The shift follows the White House's earlier accusation that Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Fable model and used banned Nvidia chips to build Kimi K3.
- Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Nvidia and Replit signed an open letter opposing broad restrictions on open-weight AI models
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and SpaceX did not sign, all companies built on closed-source businesses
- The letter warns policymakers not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation
- It argues open models broaden defensive capability and let vulnerabilities be found and fixed across many teams
I think banning Chinese open models is as good as banning open models in general. - Amjad Masad, Replit CEO
Compare Kimi K3 against Western open-weight models yourself in the coding arena.