After the release of Kimi K3, the US government restarted the ban and banned Chinese AI models

The U.S. government is reportedly renewing its efforts to ban top Chinese AI models after Chinese startup Moonshot AI released a powerful AI model called Kimi K3 last week. According to a report published by Axios on July 20, the Trump administration once again initiated related bans on the grounds of cybersecurity. Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi K3 are open-weight, and their trained model weights can be downloaded by the public. Companies can deploy the models on private infrastructure, which not only protects data from leaks, but also significantly reduces inference costs - these features have led to more and more American companies starting to adopt them. Open weights are difficult to completely block. Since open weight models can be downloaded from public repositories such as Hugging Face and independent torrents, they are difficult to completely recycle once released. After enterprises download the weights, they can run completely independently in an offline air-gapped data center, making it almost impossible for U.S. regulators to monitor which model is running locally. In addition, companies often fine-tune, quantify or distill their models, fusing Chinese models with local data, making the source lines gradually blurred, making it ultimately difficult to define what a “foreign model” is. Even if the download ban is strictly enforced, companies can still host it through subsidiaries, but this will be subject to the cloud provider's KYC rules and the extraterritorial jurisdiction of US export controls. U.S. companies generally adopt the Chinese model. Cost advantages are the main reason driving U.S. companies to switch to the Chinese model. Taking DeepSeek-V4-Pro as an example, its API charge is $0.87 per million output tokens, while Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model is as high as $50. Binance CEO Brian Armstrong said Coinbase is running models such as GLM-5.2 and Kimi in production, and overall AI spending has almost halved. Critics believe that a complete ban on Chinese models will only stifle competition and innovation and make