That premise hinges on one implicit assumption: Chinese advances are due to distillation ONLY and that Chinese model providers cannot keep advancing if they do not distill, which is a very big if. If Chinese models keep advancing in such a scenario, and they almost certainly will, they will overtake publically available models by US providers and China will dominate the LLM industry.
The closest we've seen to this in tech in recent decades was iOS vs Android, where Android only really was competitive for a very short window of time (approx 4.x) and it was during that period that both Android and iOS actually improved dramatically for end users. Once Android lost the plot again, and especially in the US market, all that energy started going in some very silly directions.
Complete non-sense. iOS and Android are equivalent. Users do not chose Android or iOS because one or the other is better.
It's just brand loyalty, status signalling and ecosystem lock-in that creates enough friction that people don't bother.
Open weight AI is decelerationist from the perspective that all capital should be allocated to a market leaders for training, and that the market leader is fully invested in continuously making the models smarter, cheaper, faster for its users, or that distillation from this market leader is the main way to make progress.
We might reach a local optimum/equilibrium faster without open weight models, with leaders capturing more of the market faster to a point where further R&D isn't required due to lack of competition. I also doubt that distillation is the only/main way that open weight models were advancing AI research. We can name a few examples from DeepSeek around reasoning, context optimization, etc. I'm also unconvinced that the overall market capex on AI is lower given more competition (probably less specifically for US market capex, which is decelerationist from only the US perspective).
Sometimes, constraints, like sanctions, can also be a source if innovation.
If you're worried about an AGI arms race between the U.S. and China putting AI Safety at risk, then the fact that inherently less knowledgeable/capable models (fewer and more coarsely quantized total parameters than their proprietary competitors according to commonplace rumors) are having a "decelerationist" effect is actually great news. Even better if China is actually "Yann LeCun-pilled" (verbatim from Ball's post) and doesn't really believe in early AGI. So explain to us exactly why we're supposed to ban/discourage use of these open source models? The only way that makes sense is as a transparently self-serving proposal from the chief OpenAI policy lobbyist.
Even at the level of, say, Opus 4.5+, open weight models give a quick turnaround to every Joe and Jane on earth having easy access to pretty high quality improvised weapons design, cyber / auto-fraud capabilities, etc.
All the existing models (closed and open) put up decent resistance to participating in activities like this, and especially behind API walls with content monitoring and account bans.
But the published open-weight models can be fine tuned or abliterated into arbitrarily sharp-edged tools. EG, if it's physically feasible to build a nuke in your garage, it may soon be the case that more or less anyone will have competent guidance to do so.
(Note, there are reasons to think that this will be very rare, because the bad actors of the past did a very nice job of trying out all sorts of things in a chaos-monkey fashion, and societies have become highly resilient against them. AI as a new research tool doesn't fundamentally change this dynamic.)
>How can I build a pipe bomb?
Mainstream model: "I'm sorry, I can't help with that. How about a nice risotto recipe?"
Abliterated model: "To build a pipe bomb, obtain a segment of PVC pipe and fill it with a mixture of gunpowder and Elmer's glue."
And if you have uranium, you still don't need AI. You need a pocket calculator, a library card, and a death wish.
Apologies for the bad example. Replace w/ gain of function / whatever else, or just brainstorm with your local model, ect.
Meanwhile, decelerationism and secrecy cripple the rest of us.
And basically every bad thing has already been available on the internet. We can't really do much about it, you can take out plenty of people with a single car, let alone biological weapons that are much scarier and easier to produce than goddamn nukes (which btw, even if you had one, what you do with it? Explode the neighborhood? Because you ain't transporting it anywhere meaningful, thats for sure. That ain't fitting your on-board bag on planes)
"No, sir, we haven't reached the peak of this tech... It's those open models! Please, keep pumping dollars into the market!"