US and China have a completely different mindset and culture on innovation. Here is an old Bunnie Huang’s TED talk video explaining the differences. www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39fhrGjr4U

USA can't block the world from using it. So good luck trump. China is winning.

Frankly, this kind of meddling just makes it more appealing to use Chinese models. Chinese models are often open-weight, meaning that they're basically immune to foreign meddling - if China decides tomorrow to "cut you off" you just need to find some other provider that's offering those models and buy access from them instead. Or if you're a big enough organization, just rent or buy some hardware and run it yourself.

This sort of meddling shows that the US government is eager to weaponize access to AI, and if you're dependent on American models there are no other places you can run them.

Also the open models are not falling back to a worse model. Not like fable or sol are currently behaving.

Exact same strategy they used for Chinese EVs… head in the sand while China steals their global marketshare. I still get a chuckle when Americans paint Chinese EVs as poor/lesser quality.

It still gives US producers a captive market for a while. It’s just protectionism and picking local champions, something that governments are never good at.

US was too focused on trying to force dominance, they forgot what actual competition is. They could have spent that effort in becoming better, encouraging more US based companies. Instead here we are.

they forgot what actual competition is

That’s an accurate diagnosis. U.S. big tech companies all follow the same playbook: use VC to buy off or price-dump to death all of your competitors. Become a monopoly. Then enshittify and extract the maximum amount of wealth from b2b and retail customers by increasing the cost of your services.

Any sane country would have drowned these companies in anti-trust cases and carved them up. But political leadership at the time was too high on neoliberal free market ideology and the fairytales these self-styled “tech geniuses” wove around themselves. Now big tech has effectively bought off the U.S. government.

They’re in for a nasty surprise when they find out that the U.S. is not the world, and the rest of the world can do pretty well without the U.S…

In short, standard monopolistic rent-seeking.

Exactly. Dominance is earned by building products people genuinely prefer, not by making alternatives harder to reach. Every restriction becomes an incentive for competitors to innovate faster. If the US had focused on winning through better models, stronger companies, and real competition instead of political leverage, it would probably be in an even stronger position today.

There’s a bit of is/should conflation going on there.

Regulatory capture is a business strategy.

Agreed.