alt Hacker NewsThis might work if Chinese models are on par with US models or slightly worse.
However if Chinese models start to become noticeably better[0] than US models, it will be hard to hold the line and businesses would start risking using illegal models to get an business advantage, which would be as simple as making HTTP requests to an inference provider outside the US.
The AI companies themselves show that there's a high capacity for lawlessness in corporate America, such as e.g. Meta and Anthropic downloading Library Genesis and getting away with a slap on the wrist.
[0] Chinese models exceeding US models could come sooner rather than later. Stock Kimi K3 is slightly worse than the frontier but it could improve with further post-training, and the weights will be released imminently. All it takes is for China to get a good pretrain and release that model into the world.
US banks would be prohibited from processing payments for those model providers, and those model providers would update their EULAs to prohibit American-usage.
Look at how online poker was "banned" in 2011. It was and always has been legal to play online poker in the US, they just made it illegal to accept wire payments for online gambling which destroyed the American market for it.
So many comments in this thread miss the point; an American "ban" on Chinese open-weights is not aiming to make individual usage impossible and wouldn't be accomplished by throwing people in jail. The point is to make their usage difficult and uncertain enough that large companies will opt for American alternatives.