OpenAI and Anthropic lobby against Chinese AI — and it might just protect themselves

the launch of moonshot ai's kimi model reignited hysteria over chinese ai competitiveness, driving openai and anthropic to lobby washington regulators for restrictions on open-weight models. tech analysts argue this panic repeats cyclical overreactions to benchmark successes, distracting from genuine policy debates. critics warn that banning these models under the guise of national security primarily serves as protectionism for incumbent us frontier labs. this dynamic forces policymakers to separate actual security threats from corporate anti-competitive maneuvering.