Brian Doherty

An interesting line in Politico’s coverage of the proposed AI executive order, which, at 16 pages, is also much longer than expected. This is still under discussion and not yet finalized, and everything I'm about to write is conjecture, but it appears the administration intends to regulate US open-weight models. Here are the reasons why this will almost certainly happen in some form. Open-weight models are currently about nine months behind the frontier. Once the big labs are subjected to pre-release screening, development itself will not slow down, but the release cadence will. At that point, open-weight development will quickly close the gap - much faster than nine months. When those models surpass the big labs, everyone will switch to using open-weight alternatives. From the administration’s perspective, allowing this option defeats the entire purpose of regulation. If the government is restricting and vetting models beyond a certain capability level, and people can simply switch to open-weight models that are just as capable - and eventually even more capable as the big labs slow down their release schedules under the new rules - then the situation becomes even worse from the government's perspective. They will not allow this to happen. Second, the big labs themselves have almost certainly been covertly lobbying for open-weight models to be included in any new regulations. Allowing the public to switch to a superior, free alternative would completely destroy their business models, potentially bankrupting them all. Given the enormous scale of current investment in these companies and in AI infrastructure, the broader economy would also suffer "significant disruption". That leaves China. If the two dynamics above play out, the same pattern repeats: everyone switches to Chinese open-weight models, which now quickly surpass both US closed and open releases. This produces the same consequences for the big labs, and causes the same issues with regulation. The government therefore has only two realistic options: ban Chinese models from use in the West, or negotiate a deal with Xi Jinping to impose identical regulation and pre-release vetting on open-weight models in China. The first option would mean China pulls ahead and wins the AI race. So the administration will almost certainly pursue the second. Negotiations are likely already underway, because the ideal outcome for the admin would be to announce that China has agreed to similar restrictions to what they are announcing, thereby blunting domestic backlash. China will know it has the US over a barrel and will insist on compromises. Compromises such as lifting all export controls on NVIDIA GPUs.