Nearly 200 startups, Y Combinator included, told Trump not to ban Chinese AI models
The Little Tech Association's Harry Godfrey and founders like Suhail Doshi say a blanket ban would not slow China down. It would kill the US startups building on open Chinese models.
Nearly 200 startups just told Washington a ban on Chinese AI models would kill them first.
Nearly 200 startups, including Y Combinator, Proton, and Yelp, put their names on an open letter sent to Washington on July 22, first reported by Politico's Sophia Cai, asking the Trump administration not to impose a blanket ban on Chinese open-weight AI models. The ask is narrow: swap a ban for targeted safeguards, because the models in question, Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and Alibaba's releases among them, are already loose in the world whether the US blocks American access to them or not.
The letter's actual ask
The coalition behind it is the Little Tech Association, a Silicon Valley startup-advocacy group led by executive director Harry Godfrey. The letter went to President Trump directly, plus Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, the officials who would actually write and enforce a ban. Its own framing: "American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide."
What the signatories want instead of a ban is what they call 'targeted safeguards', their own description of it as 'a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer.' That is a request to keep specific bad actors or specific risky uses out, not to wall off an entire category of models US companies already depend on.
Why founders are worried
The letter follows earlier reports that the Trump administration was weighing exactly that kind of blanket ban. The argument against it is a supply chain one: a US ban does not stop Kimi K3 or Alibaba's models from existing, or from being downloaded everywhere outside the US. It only removes the option for a US startup to use them, while every other market keeps that option open. Particle founder Suhail Doshi put it bluntly: "There'll be hundreds of companies that instantly die."
This is the Little Tech Association's first move on this specific fight. Nearly 200 companies signed inside the same week the administration's plans became public, which is fast for a coordinated letter with this many signatories, and reads as founders trying to get ahead of a decision rather than react to one already made.
Why a build studio cares
We build AI workflows, and open-weight models, Chinese ones included, are already a real part of that toolkit: self-hostable, no per-token bill piling up, sometimes the only capable option that fits a client's budget. A ban would not pull those models out of existence, they would keep improving and keep shipping everywhere else. It would just make using them from inside the US a legal problem, on short notice, for anyone who already built around one. That is the scenario Doshi is describing, and it is not limited to companies with China-built products. It is any US-based build with a Chinese open-weight model sitting in its architecture.
Next step: read the letter's language as collected by Jingletree, and see how it is spreading on Techmeme. If an open-weight model, Chinese-origin or otherwise, is a load-bearing piece of a stack you are building, write to us at hello@gattyworks.com.