Are Chinese Open AI Models a Gift to American Startups?

Misha Laskin says Chinese open models are a gift to American startups, and he rejects the idea that the releases are simply bad for Western markets. Ed Elson had described China's open-weight push as a mission to erode the margins of American AI businesses and upend the market, a flood of supply meant to damage the companies that pulled ahead. Laskin says the intentions matter less than the result. Great open models, wherever they come from, are something people can build on.

Closed labs crowded some of the best startups, not out of malice. Coding is lucrative, so those labs built a vertical product around it. Startups that also wanted to sell coding agents moved onto Chinese open models, customized them for their own workloads, and stood up on their own. Taking open models away over geopolitical worries would hurt American innovation. A world with no good open models would be a worse one.