Regarding China’s newly proposed restrictions on exporting sensitive technologies, including certain frontier AI models, I think I saw more people freaking out on X than in China. But then, of course, the algorithm is probably more likely to feed me those people. If you understand China’s overall strategy, I don’t think you should interpret this as an attempt to kill open source. What China wants is greater control over strategically important technologies while encouraging their adoption around the world. Those two goals aren’t contradictory. The government has made it pretty clear that it wants Chinese AI products and services to expand internationally. API access, SaaS, and lightweight on-device deployments are explicitly excluded from the proposed foundation-model export controls. Even for certain restricted technologies, including new open-source releases, it’s proposing simplified licensing procedures that could make exporting relatively straightforward. Where things get complicated is with the core technology itself, including potentially model weights, training techniques, and transfers of intellectual property or ownership. Certain frontier models could face additional scrutiny based on their size, training compute, or performance. Exactly how these rules will apply to new open-weight releases remains an important question, although I personally expect more scrutiny of the underlying know-how than of the weights themselves. My bigger hypothesis is that China is establishing this regulatory framework before it really needs to use it aggressively, at least when it comes to AI. It’s setting up the ability to exercise greater control in the future, when Chinese AI may be in a much stronger competitive position. Right now, China hasn’t established a decisive overall lead in frontier AI, so it has strong incentives to keep its ecosystem relatively open. That helps Chinese developers catch up, accelerate innovation, and encourage global adoption. And China isn’t promoting open source simply out of generosity. The more widely Chinese models are used, the more commercial opportunities and influence Chinese companies can build around them. That’s why I’d be surprised if the eventual rules were designed to broadly discourage Chinese companies from open-sourcing their models. Being overly restrictive would undermine much of what China is trying to accomplish. Of course, there are legitimate national-security concerns, particularly around AI technologies that could enable cyberattacks or threaten critical infrastructure. China wants its AI capabilities to spread globally, but that doesn’t mean it wants unrestricted transfers of every underlying technology. And frankly, allowing dangerous AI capabilities to proliferate without safeguards would be no bueno for world peace, or world stability.