[YC and Other U.S. AI Startups Jointly Oppose Ban on Kimi and Qwen: Ban Will Only Benefit Anthropic] According to monitoring by Beating, the U.S. startup organization Little Tech Association, along with Y Combinator and 179 other signatories, sent a letter to the Trump administration opposing a total ban on China's open-weight models. The letter specifically mentioned Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max. Open-weight models can be downloaded for local deployment and modification without requiring data to be handed over to model providers. The signatories stated that many U.S. startups have already integrated Chinese open models into their official operations. A total ban would not prevent these models from spreading overseas but would instead increase costs for U.S. companies. Suhail Doshi, founder of Particle, warned that the ban could put hundreds of companies relying on open models into crisis, while closed-source model providers like Anthropic would benefit instead. Currently, the Trump administration has not proposed an official ban. The White House is investigating whether Chinese models are replicating U.S. models through distillation, but there has been no serious internal discussion about a total ban, and the Department of Commerce has not drafted an entity list proposal. [Original Link]