Anthropic's three proposals — no chips to China, punishing distillation, and regulatory pre-approval of models — are a subtle form of regulatory capture that would add up to de facto banning of open-weights Chinese models, and the other companies signed Jensen's letter out of self-interest: everyone's business model gets a lot better if the two frontier labs can't extract about a hundred billion dollars of revenue this year.

Rory argues that despite publicly saying it doesn't want to ban open weights, Anthropic's three asks — no chips to China, punishing distillation, and regulatory pre-approval of models — would add up to a de facto ban of Chinese open-source models, a subtle form of regulatory capture. He adds that most signatories joined Jensen's letter not out of reverence but self-interest, since everyone's business model improves if the two frontier labs can't extract roughly $100B of revenue this year. ✦ AI generated

Rory · 20VC · 2026-07-30 · original ↗

You're right, Jason. The open open stuff is real. And while in public um anthropic are saying we don't want to ban open weight the truth is the combination of saying we don't want to sell stuff to China chips to China we can argue both sides of that actually second we want to really punish people for distillation right and then the third point they made is we want some kind of regulatory process to approve models right that's the recommended thing from the letter today and there's no doubt in my mind that the third one in particular, can you imagine a regulatory process for approving models that ultimately approves all those Chinese open source models? It is a subtle form of regulatory capture. Yeah, sounds reasonable on the surface, but the likely result of it would be dramatically restricted competition, especially from the open open way Chinese models. So, yeah, kind of fast forwarding to the end and working back. While they're not saying they want to ban these things, they're advocating a series of steps that would add up to de facto banning or at least slowing them down. And that's what's driving everyone else to say, 'Hey, no, we don't want this.' As often is the case. And that's why I kind of there are some arguments on both sides and some of the issues, right? I think the chip is you could go either way. And Jensen ain't going to go for the don't sell chips to China argument, right? I think there are national security discussions that could be had around that. So, it's not like it's all correct on one side. Everyone's not piling on to that letter because they're like, 'Oh my god, Jensen, you're a god and I want to agree with you.' Though he is a god and you should agree with him. They're piling on because they're like, 'Everyone's business model gets a lot better if the two frontier labs can't extract about a hundred billion dollars of revenue this year from the businesses.'

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