Trump administration revives push to ban Chinese open-weight AI models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek

The Trump administration is reportedly reviving efforts to ban Chinese open-weight AI models, including Kimi K3 and DeepSeek, citing cybersecurity concerns. The push follows the release of Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI. Open-weight models allow enterprises to self-host, cutting costs and preserving data privacy, which has driven adoption by U.S. companies like Coinbase. Critics, including former White House advisers, argue the ban would stifle innovation and hand a monopoly to U.S. labs OpenAI and Anthropic. Enforcement faces major hurdles: open-weight models are downloadable from public repositories and can run offline in air-gapped data centers, making a ban nearly impossible to enforce for enterprises. The U.S. previously considered adding Chinese AI labs to the Entity List and drafting an executive order on liability for security breaches, but paused those measures due to internal pushback.