This is a silly argument. Like yes, obviously it’s of less U.S. concern if one American is robbing another versus a foreign interest. We can deal with one whenever while the other creates constraints.

The better arguments are the ones made in the article. Open weights increase competition and thus AI availability in the U.S. economy.

This is not robbing. Undesired distillation is a ToS violation, at best.

There is not even jurisdiction over Chinese companies, because they don't sell their LLM subscribtions, unlike US companies, and those comitted much more severe violations in getting their training material than a ToS violation or two (Anthropic already found guilty).

edit: I don't see this as legal argument against the ban, more like a justification for why basically no moral person is gonna side with OpenAI and Anthropic on this. US gov can try and ban as many weights as they want, I expect that to be similarly effective as banning numbers was in the past (i.e. not).

It's not like those American companies were only stealing form Americans. Maybe you could argue about utility, but morally I don't see any ground to stand on

And the utility argument is also very shaky. The proposed punishment for foreign interests stealing "US data" is that other Americans now aren't allowed to benefit from that, while the rest of the world can

Obviously stealing is bad, doesn't matter who you steal from. In this case, its a simple case of no honour amongst thieves.

Whether or not it’s robbery is irrelevant. It’s the proposed remedy that is the problem

Blatantly lack of principles.