Many business owners who increasingly rely on open source models have urged the Trump administration not to restrict access to Chinese models. And China, which has dismissed accusations of frontier model copying, has called on the US to listen to its business community or else risk putting the US at a further economic disadvantage.

Policy research conducted for Congress and submitted to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March suggested that the US may already be at a disadvantage because it focused too heavily on maintaining a lead in frontier AI while failing to advance its own open source ecosystem. In the meantime, China recognized this gap and moved to fill it.

As researchers explained:

US export controls are calibrated to constrain frontier training by restricting access to advanced semiconductors. They do not address the small-model deployment cycle, which requires less advanced compute, draws on openly available base models, and generates advantage through application rather than pre-training. If the models that matter most for industrial AI are small, specialized, and open, the current US policy framework could be targeting the wrong layer of the competition.

Companies like Nvidia and Meta have vowed to help the US catch up. Researchers have warned that if the US loses a broad user base to China, it could set back America’s “ability to set the technical standards and norms that will govern AI development for years to come.” And that loss of global leadership could harm national security and the US economy, some in Congress fear.

US Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs the House China Committee, has taken a hard stance, maintaining that “no federal government entity should use a Chinese AI model,” Reuters reported.

“Doing so only ⁠makes the federal government more dependent on Chinese AI models, and that is not in the national interest,” Moolenaar said.