Open-weight models are becoming the foundation for the next AI ecosystem. The US should compete in it, not wall itself off. I have seen a version of this story before. In 2013 I co-founded Mesosphere, an open source cloud-native software company. We built on Apache Mesos, which my co-founder Ben Hindman had helped create at UC Berkeley. We later built DC/OS (Data Center Operating System) around Mesos, released it as open source, and commercialized it through an enterprise distribution with support and proprietary features. After several years of massive growth, Kubernetes disrupted us. It was newer, fully open source, and it quickly galvanized the cloud-native community. Many of the world’s best distributed-systems and infrastructure engineers bet their careers on it, and even some of our most loyal community members changed horses. Once that happened, innovation moved to Kubernetes. Whatever the platform was missing, someone started building: networking, storage, observability, deployment tools, policy engines.

Full critique : As open-weight models become the next AI ecosystem’s foundation, a US ban on Chinese models would risk ceding the neutral substrate where innovation compounds.