Sanctions would cancel the whole business rationale for the Chinese government having/supporting open weight models. You can't commoditize your competitors with open-source if your product is blocked.

Even with US sanctions, Chinese AI companies would continue to serve users in every other country in the world (including China itself), so I don't see why they would stop releasing open weight models.

The open weights models would be even more effective by incentivizing people and companies to switch jurisdictions. It might even break SFs monopoly on AI, or at least weaken it, everybody isn’t there exclusively to funnel money to openAI and Anthropic.

It would also boost research in non US jurisdiction. Who is going to be wooed by “come to our lab where you’re only allowed to work with closed models!”

Open-weights models will be downloaded from China and run on local/corporate-owned AI hardware. You would have to ban Internet access and AI hardware next.