The launch of the latest AI model from a Chinese company, Moonshot AI’s Kimi, has reignited debates about American competitiveness and open versus proprietary AI.

While there has been a lot of conversation on social media, it appears the debate is also taking place behind the scenes in Washington, DC, where OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly lobbied regulators with concerns about open Chinese models.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane and I discuss why this seems to be such a hot topic. Beyond suggesting that certain people should “hit the grass” instead of spending their weekends arguing about

And Kirsten noted that imposing heavy restrictions on Chinese AI models could primarily benefit a handful of companies: “Are we accelerating and ensuring that the Americans win the AI ​​race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs perform better than others?

Continue reading to see an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Antonio Ha: For people who have been following the discourse around Chinese AI, this will probably sound very, very familiar from the launch of DeepSeek, where basically a Chinese model comes out; In some benchmarks, it also does, or at least appears competitive, with some of the cutting-edge models; and a certain part of the technology industry loses its mind.

some of this [debate] received additional scrutiny because one of the people who posted about it was [an executive] on OpenAI. But in general there is [is] this recurring question of: Can Chinese companies beat American companies, at least in some respects, and do so much cheaper and much more openly?

Sean O’Kane: Yes, there are many elements of this that seem as if we are seeing repeats of previous phenomena. I think one of my favorites is: Everyone is so ready. [for] and thus wait for something to come and destroy everything else. And I think my favorite example of that last week was people bragging that “OMG, Kimi made a complete replica of macOS in 30 minutes.” And yes, it made a pretty impressive graphical reproduction of what macOS looks like, but it’s not an operating system.

We keep seeing these things happen over and over again, where everyone is very nervous in the tech industry. And I think particularly with some of the Chinese models coming out, there’s this expectation, and I think this gets to the core of why people reacted the way they reacted last weekend. (Also, by the way: get out there, hit the grass, it’s the weekend. Everyone in the industry was trading barbs on Twitter all weekend.) But this nervousness is really interesting to me because we’re now a bye week away and I don’t think anyone feels like the end is near like they did a week ago.

Kirsten Korosec: We have a really great story written by one of our reporters, Tim Fernholz, that tries to unravel the psychosis around this here in the United States. Point out several reasons. And he concludes, and I don’t want to conclude it for him, but I think there is one who reaches higher than others.

There is concern that these Chinese open-weight models may have an implicit bias towards China; There is another concern about security risks and security barriers. But there is also a fairly important idea here, which is protectionism, and who is going to “win the race,” in quotes? Will it be the United States or China? And that seems to be driving a lot of the fear.

I don’t know, Anthony, are you okay with that?

Antonio: I completely agree. I think the Chinese aspect always adds a certain level of hysteria. And that’s not to say people shouldn’t worry about how the United States compares to China in different industries. But it is amplified a lot.

The other thing this reminds me of is the TikTok discussion from a few years ago. And again, it’s not that I thought the concerns around TikTok were totally made up, but the level of panic that people reached – it seems like as soon as you add the word China to any discussion, things just escalate dramatically. And then in this case, it’s linked to this discussion about openness [weights] and this idea that AI is so powerful and so dangerous that the only way to control it is with these proprietary models of these American border companies.

Obviously, most people say this. [have] reasons why they want to say that. David Sacks, who was the AI ​​czar during the Trump administration [and] Now he has a different role in the Trump administration, yelling at And so it is a way to defend the positions they already had around AI. “My God, if China beats us, that’s unthinkable, so you have to do what I want to do anyway.”

Kirsten: Well, and if there were blanket bans on Chinese open weight models, I’m not saying there aren’t real concerns here, but let’s just look at that. If we did that, it would benefit the models created by OpenAI, for example, and force companies to use them instead of models like Kimi.

So the question really needs to be asked: Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI ​​race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs perform better than others?

be: At this point, we should say that a lot of this discussion was actually started by OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean Ball, who was the first to publish this really long post mentioning some of these concerns.

Part of me thinks the reaction to this was because people didn’t agree with what Dean wrote. Part of me also thinks the reaction was fueled by the fact that he just said that out loud. He basically said that the United States should create regulatory FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and ruin the ability of these open weight models to compete with the United States. [Ball later backed away from this argument.]

And to me, I think you can read it in some of people’s responses, like, “You’re not supposed to say that out loud, Dean.”