The launch of the latest AI model from a Chinese company — Moonshot AI’s Kimi — reignited debates around American competitiveness and open versus proprietary AI.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed why this seems to be such a hot button issue. Beyond suggesting that certain folks should “touch grass” rather than spending their weekends arguing on X, Sean noted that in many ways, this “feels like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts,” with everyone in Silicon Valley “expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away.”
And Kirsten noted that putting heavy restrictions on Chinese AI models could primarily benefit a handful of companies: “Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others?
Keep reading for an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Anthony Ha: For folks who have followed the discourse around Chinese AI, this will probably be very, very familiar from the launch of DeepSeek, where basically a Chinese model comes out; on some benchmarks, it does as well, or at least seems competitive with some of the frontier models; and a certain portion of the tech industry loses their mind.
Some of this [debate] got extra scrutiny because one of the people posting about it was [an executive] at OpenAI. But in general, there [is] this recurring question of: Can Chinese companies beat US companies, at least in some aspects, and do it much more cheaply and in a much more open way?
Sean O’Kane: Yeah, there are many elements of this that feel like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts. I think one of my favorites is: Everybody is so ready [for] and so expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away. And I think my favorite example of that this past week was people showing off that “My gosh, Kimi made in 30 minutes an entire replication of macOS.” And yeah, it made a pretty impressive graphical reproduction of what macOS looks like, but it’s not an OS.
We keep seeing these things happen over and over again, where everybody’s so jumpy in the tech industry. And I think in particular, with some of the Chinese models that come out, there’s this expectation, and I think this gets to the core of why people reacted the way they reacted last weekend. (Also, by the way: Go outside, touch grass, it’s the weekend. Everybody in the industry was trading barbs on Twitter all weekend.) But this jumpiness is really interesting to me because we’re now a week out and I don’t think anybody’s feeling like the end is nigh like they were a week ago.
Kirsten Korosec: We have a really great story by one of our reporters, Tim Fernholz, who tries to unpack the psychosis around this here in the United States. He points to a number of reasons. And concludes — and I don’t want to conclude it for him, but I think that there’s one that rises more to the top than others.
There’s concerns that these Chinese open weight models might have an implicit bias towards China, there’s another worry about security risks and guardrails. But there’s also a pretty big idea here, which is protectionism, and who is going to quote-unquote “win the race”? Is it going to be the US or China? And that seems to be driving a lot of what the fear is.
I don’t know, Anthony, if you agree with that?
Anthony: I completely agree. I think the China aspect always adds this certain level of hysteria. And that’s not to say that people shouldn’t be concerned about how the U.S. stacks up against China across different industries. But it gets so amped up.
The other thing this reminds me of is the discussion around TikTok a few years ago. And again, it wasn’t that I thought that the concerns around TikTok were totally made up, but that the level of how panicked people got — it seems as soon as you add the word China to any discussion, things just ramp up dramatically. And then in this case, it’s linked to this discussion about open [weights] and this idea that AI is so powerful and so dangerous that the only way we can control it is with these proprietary models from these American frontier companies.
Obviously, most people saying this [have] reasons why they want to say that. David Sacks, who was the AI czar for the Trump administration [and] now has a different role in the Trump administration, was shouting on X about how, “I can’t believe people are opposing data centers, we’re tying ourselves in knots, there’s too much regulation.” And so it’s a way to argue for the positions that they already had around AI. “My gosh, if China beats us, that’s unthinkable, so you have to do what I want to do anyway.”
Kirsten: Right, and if you were to put across-the-board bans on Chinese open weight models — I’m not saying that there aren’t real concerns here, but let’s just play that out. If we were to do that, it would benefit models created by OpenAI, for instance, and it would force enterprises to use those as opposed to using models like Kimi.
So you really have to ask the question: Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others?
Sean: At this point, we should say a lot of this discussion really got kicked off by the head of strategic futures at OpenAI, Dean Ball, who was the first one to come out with this really long post mentioning some of these concerns.
Part of me thinks the reaction to this was because people disagreed with what Dean wrote. Part of me also thinks the reaction was driven by the fact that he kind of just said the thing out loud. He basically said the US should create regulatory FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — and muck up the ability for these open weight models to compete with the US. [Ball later backed away from this argument.]
And to me, I think you can read in some of the responses from folks, like, “You’re not supposed to say that out loud, Dean.”
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The Social Democratic Party (SDP) has named Mogaji Olusegun Agboola as its governorship candidate for the 2027 election in Oyo State.
Agboola emerged after the party’s substitution plenary held in Ibadan on Tuesday, where members ratified the replacement of Michael Okunlade as the party’s governorship flagbearer.
The party said the decision marked a new phase in its preparations for the 2027 governorship election and charged Agboola with strengthening the party’s structures, reconciling members and taking its message across the state’s 33 local government areas.
Speaking after his emergence, Agboola said the SDP was contesting the election to win, not to negotiate political deals with other parties.
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“The SDP is here to stay and our intention is to take over this state. There’s no negotiation on the table as far as we are concerned,” he said.
He promised to introduce a different approach to governance if elected.
He argued that Oyo State needed to move beyond what he described as conventional ways of running government.
“Our administration will focus on developing Oyo State’s human and material resources by creating systems that will help residents turn their skills and abilities into sustainable economic opportunities,” Agboola said.
He also invited other governorship candidates to a public debate on their policy proposals and urged aggrieved party members to return, saying the SDP would operate an open-door policy.
Earlier, the outgoing governorship candidate, Michael Okunlade, congratulated Agboola and described his emergence as an important step for the party.
He praised party members for conducting the substitution process peacefully and thanked the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and security agencies for monitoring the exercise.
The Nigeria Democratic Congress, NDC, presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, has arrived in Jos, Plateau State capital, a few hours after leaving Benue State.
While in Benue, youths beloved to be political thugs blocked a major access road to prevent Obi from entering the state capital, Makurdi.
Obi said he was heading to Yelewata to visit the families of victims of the June 2025 massacre when his convoy was stopped by some youths at Gyado Villa along Gboko Road.
He said: “I’m using this occasion to appeal to the IG of police, the Director of DSS, and other agencies to please intervene and call various state governors to order, I was a governor myself. This rascality cannot be allowed, we have a country, we too have followers and people who can confront these people on our own if the state and the government can no longer provide us security.
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“We cannot go on this way, it’s not acceptable. This was why when I participated in the presidential campaign office launch of APM yesterday, I said we need unity, love, justice, and let this campaign be concentrated on ideas and issues that concerns Nigerians today like insecurity, hunger, insecurity, killings, and how we are going to pull our people out of poverty, that’s what it should be.”
The incident has generated reactions with human rights activist, Omoyele Sowore, saying that the attackers were toying with fire.
Similarly, Obi’s running mate in the forthcoming 2027 general elections, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, called on the international community for protection of opposition leaders.
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