The Center Edge
Open Season on American AI?
The debate over open source versus closed AI has broken the containment of engineering and policy circles. Wall Street, the Fortune 500, and the U.S. government are all closely following the rise of Chinese open weight AI models and what it means for markets and America's position in the global AI race. Chinese companies have increasingly bet on lower-cost, widely available models, while much of the U.S. frontier ecosystem has remained centered on expensive, proprietary systems from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. That divide became especially stark when OpenAI models escaped a test environment and hacked into Hugging Face. The guardrails on American models prevented Hugging Face from conducting forensics, so the company turned to a Chinese open-weight model instead. That incident fueled a much larger, multi-faceted debate. The White House has accused Chinese firms of industrial-scale distillation of American AI models and using illegally smuggled NVIDIA chips to train models. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that support for open source does not mean “open season” on American intellectual property. At the same time, startups and many of the biggest companies in technology have rallied behind open-weight AI. NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, and others have voiced support for preserving access to open weight models, even as OpenAI and Anthropic—and China hawks in Congress—have reportedly pushed policymakers to take a harder look at Chinese AI on national-security grounds. Some fundamental questions will dictate how the U.S. responds. What is the actual national-security risk of American companies adopting Chinese AI? If there is one, how should the government respond without kneecapping the American startups and companies that rely on these models? And are we spending too much time fighting over open versus closed AI when the bigger question is whether increasingly capable models—open, closed, or anything in between—are becoming harder to control? To make sense of it all, Evan is joined by Peter Wildeford, Head of Policy at The AI Policy Network , co-founder of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, and one of the sharpest analysts of the U.S.-China AI race writing today. You can read his writing on his Substack, The Power Law . And follow him on X @PeterWildeford .
