YC and Other US AI Startups Jointly Oppose Restrictions on Chinese Open-Weight AI Models Like Kimi, Qwen

TechFlow News, July 23, according to Politico, nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton, Y Combinator, and others, wrote to the Trump administration, opposing restrictions on U.S. companies accessing Chinese open-weight AI models. The letter was initiated by the newly formed "Small Tech Association", recipients include Trump, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios.

The report pointed out that the focus of the controversy is whether the U.S. government should restrict developers from accessing AI models published by Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI and Alibaba, where model weights are publicly available. The co-signing companies believe that if a broad ban is implemented, it will not only be difficult to prevent the spread of relevant models, but will instead weaken the product development capabilities of U.S. startups and drive up their costs of using AI models.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has recently continued to strengthen accusations against Chinese AI companies, including questioning whether they trained their own systems through improper "distillation" of U.S. models. The report states that as of Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Commerce has not yet drafted a plan to list Chinese AI companies on the Entity List.