The Chinese government has spent three years giving away its most capable artificial intelligence to anyone to use. That generosity was always temporary. Chinese authorities have reportedly been meeting with Alibaba, ByteDance and the start-up Z.ai to discuss restricting overseas access to some of China’s most advanced models — including systems that have not yet been released.
The U.S. government’s instinct will likely be to answer with a ban of its own. That would be a mistake. The right response is the opposite: America and its allies should build and deploy their own so-called open-weight models, which users can download, run and modify on their machines. They should do so at scale, and commit to releasing new and better versions on a dependable schedule — so that anyone building on an American model can count on the next one arriving. China’s move is an opening for the United States to take the lead again on A.I. It will not stay open for long.