YC and 179 U.S. AI startups oppose a ban on Kimi and Qwen, warning it would benefit Anthropic.

ME News reports that on July 23 (UTC+8), according to monitoring by Beating, the U.S. startup organization Little Tech Association, along with 179 other signatories including Y Combinator, sent a letter to the Trump administration opposing a complete ban on Chinese open-weight models. The letter specifically named Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max. Open-weight models can be downloaded and deployed locally for modification, without requiring users to hand over their data to model providers. The signatories noted that many U.S. startups are already using Chinese open models in live business operations. A full ban would not prevent these models from spreading overseas, but would only increase costs for American companies. Suhail Doshi, founder of Particle, warned that such a ban could plunge hundreds of companies reliant on open models into crisis, while closed-source model providers like Anthropic would benefit. As of now, the Trump administration has not proposed any formal ban. The White House is investigating whether Chinese models have replicated U.S. models via distillation, but there has been no serious internal discussion of a complete ban, and the Department of Commerce has not drafted any entity list proposals. (Source: BlockBeats)