Bessent says U.S. could sanction China over AI model ‘theft’

Funny how AI suddenly becomes sacred intellectual property only when someone else catches up. If the evidence is real, enforce the rules. If it is not, this risks looking less like protecting innovation and more like protecting market leaders from uncomfortable competition.

Ai is viewed as a national strategic resource. Laws/lax regulations which favour American ai growth will be encouraged, any serious competition, especially from a true geopolitical rival, will be blocked as best as possible (e.g., all of America’s chip export restrictions on China.)

That being said, Bessent probably won’t do a damn thing. America just publicly lost a trade war w China and is now losing an actual war. I could still see trump’s belligerent ass trying something but I’d giggle with anticipation about how he’d have to walk it back within the week.

Edit: first word It to Ai.

Both Washington and Beijing now treat AI less like software and more like oil or nuclear technology. Once that happens, export controls are almost inevitable. The real question is whether open weight AI make those controls increasingly irrelevant over time.

Open wait AI? No. Open source AI? Yes.

Open weight AI only allows you to tune the parameters and run it locally, where open source AI also gives you the training data and stuff that was used to make the model itself.

That distinction is totally correct in principle, but in practice almost no frontier model releases its training data because of licensing, privacy, and sheer scale. Today, Open Weight AI has become the common compromise: useful for research and local use, even if it falls well short of the traditional open source definition.

Look at OLMO from AI2

There are lots of awesome OSAI! But today, they are completely outperformed by OWAI and closed AI. My guess: that won’t change in future.