OpenAI is scared of open-weight models. Should the US be? | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. The impressive capabilities of Chinese lab Moonshot’s Kimi K3, the biggest open-weight large language model, have kicked off a debate that conflates two things: the economic possibilities of American AI giants and the future of LLMs as a technology. OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean W. Ball, went so far as to argue that the U.S. government should find a pretext to create regulatory fear, uncertainty, and distrust around the new models, since open-weight models must necessarily deter capital spending by the frontier labs. People freaked out, with tech luminaries like Yann LeCun and Martin Casado arguing that open software can accelerate innovation and coexist with proprietary projects. Ball soon retracted his claims that a regulatory crackdown was the White House’s “best strategy” and that open-weight models necessarily slow down advances in the technology. However, Axios reports that the Trump administration is considering banning K3 and other advanced Chinese models at the