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Sriram Krishnan on Open Source AI's Biggest Week Yet
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Should the U.S. Government Restrict Chinese Open-Source Models?
At 16:00 · chapter starts 13:40
Theo raises an Axios report that the Trump administration is considering restricting Chinese open-source AI models, citing either national security concerns or the fact that they have reached near-Claude-level capability in agentic coding. Krishnan has no inside information from his former colleagues, but he can offer context. [1] — Sriram Krishnan "The most capable open-weight models right now are Kimi K3, Deepseek, and Qwen — all Chinese. Sriram Krishnan says flatly: he would much rat…" 15:40 The Trump administration's AI action plan, which he helped craft, explicitly champions open source in its opening section — so any blanket crackdown on open-source AI would be in tension with the administration's own stated policy. But Krishnan is blunt on one point: the fact that the leading open-weight models — Kimi K3, Deepseek, Qwen — are Chinese rather than American is not a comfortable situation. He rattles off the American efforts underway: Gemma from Google, Nimotron from NVIDIA, Thinking Machines, new startups. He expects them to improve. But the current moment is one where Chinese models lead open source, and that has real implications for national security, economic competitiveness, and the deployment of AI by allied governments.
The Trump administration's AI action plan explicitly highlighted the importance of open source AI in its opening section, signaling early policy support.
The most capable open-weight models right now are Kimi K3, Deepseek, and Qwen — all Chinese. Sriram Krishnan says flatly: he would much rather the leading models be American. Gemma, Nimotron, and new startups are trying, but the U.S. is currently behind.
Linus Torvalds said 'given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.' Sriram Krishnan applies this to AI: open-weight models downloaded from Hugging Face can be inspected by the entire world, making them inherently more auditable than closed frontier models. Security through transparency, not obscurity.
