“And they warn that banning Americans from downloading Chinese open-weight models wouldn’t stop their proliferation — but would weaken U.S. startups.”
Well this doesn’t even make sense.
It does because corporations, especially smaller ones competing with bigger ones, actually do get prosecuted for violating restrictions like this a lot more than individuals do.
Weaken U.S startups = Can’t legally develop commercial products that use or remix the latest open weights models in novel/creative/cost-reducing/etc ways, while companies from the rest of the world could (including China, who this is ostensibly supposed to be punishing)
Wouldn't stop proliferation = Despite that, your non-programmer 14 year old child can still install the latest Qwen model on Day 1 by copying a one liner command they got from a YouTube short that sources from a Gitlab repo outside US jurisdiction