Regulation won't beat engineering here. China will continue to release open weight models that are impossible to ban without unprecedented surveillance in Western countries.

AI labs need to innovate if they want to win. Open models are capitalism. Ideally Western companies should get more efficient, but if we can't then we should be doing the opposite of regulation, and subsidizing western models.

There's a baby and bathwater situation here. If the US actually starts entertaining protectionism here, it might push most of the rest of the world (including places like the EU, India, South America, etc.) away from Openai and Anthropic towards other models not controlled by the US (which is mostly models made in China currently).

OpenAI and Anthropic kind of need that revenue to justify their current valuations. The US market by itself is too small for that. And if that money dries up, it's going to be much harder for them to maintain their technical head start. The US starting to impose all sorts of restrictions here would not be helpful.

Given all the models were effectively subsidized by being granted free access to copyrighted data for training on it only makes sense for the resulting weights to be free.