The Chinese government has spent three years giving away its most capable artificial intelligence to anyone to use. That generosity was always temporary. Chinese authorities have reportedly been meeting with Alibaba, ByteDance and the start-up Z.ai to discuss restricting overseas access to some of China’s most advanced models — including systems that have not yet been released.
The U.S. government’s instinct will likely be to answer with a ban of its own. That would be a mistake. The right response is the opposite: America and its allies should build and deploy their own so-called open-weight models, which users can download, run and modify on their machines. They should do so at scale, and commit to releasing new and better versions on a dependable schedule — so that anyone building on an American model can count on the next one arriving. China’s move is an opening for the United States to take the lead again on A.I. It will not stay open for long.
An A.I. model’s “weights” are the billions of individual settings acquired and fine-tuned during training that help determine how a model responds to prompts. When a company keeps its weights secret, as OpenAI does with GPT, other companies and developers can rent access through its servers — but they cannot look inside or take the model with them. When a company publishes these weights, as the Chinese company DeepSeek has for its A.I. model, any user can download and run the weights on its own hardware, inspect them and retrain them for a specialized task.
That is how China is arguably winning the A.I. race. Last week, the Chinese start-up Moonshot A.I. unveiled Kimi K3, which the company says is the world’s largest open-weight A.I. model and rivals the performance of Anthropic and OpenAI’s best models to date. Alibaba’s Qwen is now the most downloaded A.I. model family on earth. Developers have used it to build more than 100,000 specialized models of their own. On OpenRouter, a service that lets developers send their work to whichever A.I. model they choose, Chinese open-weight models accounted for more than 20 percent of the units of text processed over a number of weeks in 2025 and more than 40 percent over a few weeks this spring; in 2024, such models’ weekly processing of text was as low as about 1 percent.
Much of that traffic is American. Airbnb’s customer service agent runs substantially on Qwen; Airbnb’s chief executive, Brian Chesky, has called the model fast and cheap. Cursor, among the most valuable A.I. coding start-ups in the country, built its Composer 2 model on a base licensed from Moonshot. DoorDash now routes the “lower-level work” of its code review system to Kimi, DoorDash’s co-founder Andy Fang reports, reserving an American model for the hardest tasks. More American businesses, attracted by lower costs, are joining these start-ups in using these models.
This had been China’s plan since 2017: push Chinese models into every market, shape the standards others adopt and pull the world toward the Chinese hardware the models run best on. The country ran the same sequence with solar and telecom equipment and, most notably, critical minerals — building the world’s dependence on cheap rare earths before restricting exports once that dependence was real.
If Chinese labs restrict access now, won’t everyone just switch to a better American model? No, because switching an A.I. model is not like canceling a subscription. It means tearing out a foundation. A European manufacturer running a Chinese model on its own premises, trained on confidential records that cannot legally leave the building, cannot simply swap in a superior American model that costs more to use and runs on someone else’s servers. That dependence is key to China’s strategy. A country that can’t switch off a foreign model has handed China a grip on the systems it runs on.
Developers outside China should be concerned about what’s next. Everyone building on a Chinese model assumes a better one is coming — free, as it always has been. If China keeps its next generation of models at home, the rest of the world’s builders who rely on something freely modifiable are stuck with an antiquated version, while Chinese firms advance with something more powerful. The gap widens with every release.
Two U.S. congressional committees have opened investigations into Airbnb and Cursor’s parent company over their use of Chinese models. The Trump administration is reportedly considering effectively barring Americans from using Chinese A.I. models. But banning those models would impede American developers and hand China the claim that its technology is too good for America to compete with fairly. The United States dominates in tech by making its platforms the ones the world’s developers choose to build on, not by banning foreign use.
The U.S. government should fund a contract to train an advanced open-weight model. It should stipulate those weights remain permanently open. That contract would give companies in the United States and allied nations a foundation to build on and compete in this arena of A.I. development. OpenAI and Google have released open-weight models, but only occasionally, because nothing rewards them for doing it consistently. The buyers of such a model would be the firms already reaching for Qwen and Kimi as well as the international partners that will not put their data on Chinese servers.
Customers that adopt an open-weight American model also need the chips to run it, somewhere to store data and the computing power to put the model to work. That is what the Development Finance Corporation and the Export-Import Bank — the government agencies that back U.S. business abroad — should be financing all at once. Chinese models have come to dominate in places like Nairobi and São Paulo because China made them free, packaging the model, the hardware and the financing together. America has the capital and the technology to offer the same package, on better terms, with security standards that even newcomers can meet.
OpenAI and Anthropic’s business is the “frontier”: the hardest, highest-value work, offered to customers that want the best model available and will pay for it. That is not the business an open-weight model takes, where finances or data-sensitivity factor in more heavily. For many U.S. customers, the frontier model keeps the hard work moving, and something cheaper — and easier to tinker with — sits underneath it. The frontier lab gets paid either way.
The only question is whose model is underneath. It should be an American one.
Jason Hsu is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
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