I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?

1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models?

2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway

3. it’s not stopping distillation either, Chinese labs are already banned from using US frontier models and look at how good that is working

I don’t get it. Am I missing something? The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore, and should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return? In any case this would be something benefitting only a very few for a short time (labs + investors).

Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.