US AI Startups Including YC Join Forces to Oppose Kimi, Qwen Blacklist: Banning Will Only Feed Anthropic

According to TrendForce's Beating Monitor, the U.S. startup organization Little Tech Association, together with Y Combinator and 179 other signatories, has sent a letter to the Trump administration opposing the complete ban on China's open-weight model.

The letter specifically mentions Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max. The open-weight model can be downloaded for local deployment and modification without the need to provide data to the model manufacturer.

The signatories stated that many U.S. startups have already used the Chinese open model for commercial purposes. A full ban will not prevent these models from spreading overseas and will only increase the costs for American companies.

Suhail Doshi, the founder of Particle, warned that the ban could put hundreds of companies that rely on open models in crisis, while closed-source model manufacturers like Anthropic would benefit instead.

Currently, the Trump administration has not proposed a formal ban. The White House is investigating whether Chinese models have replicated U.S. models through distillation, but there has been no serious internal discussion about a complete ban, and the Commerce Department has not drafted a entity list proposal.