Congress advances new bill to give US edge in open-source AI race with China

The US Congress advanced a bill on Tuesday that aims to bolster American leadership in open-source artificial intelligence (AI), an area where China presently holds the advantage. The legislation, the Open-Source AI Leadership Act (H.R. 10152), was one of several proposals discussed by the US House of Representatives to counter China's expanding tech influence.

Introduced last week, H.R. 10152 directs the US Department of Commerce to identify obstacles to adopting US open-weight models and analyze their adoption rates compared to Chinese counterparts. Open-weight models, or open-source models, are AI models freely available online for users with the right hardware to download and modify.

While top US AI models like OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude are typically closed-source, most leading Chinese models are released as open-weight models. The bill's chief sponsor, Republican Gabe Evans from Colorado, highlighted the urgency of the issue, stating that Chinese companies like Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot are deeply linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

During the bill's mark-up session, Evans noted that US companies are increasingly trailing behind Chinese counterparts in the global market for open-weight models. According to AI newsletter Interconnects, Chinese open-weight models recorded over 328 million downloads globally in a recent month, more than double the usage of US models after the release of powerful Chinese models like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and DeepSeek's updated V4 Pro.

The bill also establishes a single point of contact at the Commerce Department to promote the use of US open-weight models among US companies, government agencies, states, and qualified foreign partners. The department would further publicize risks associated with using Chinese models, such as censorship, supply chain vulnerabilities, and misuse risks, within 18 months of the bill's enactment.

While the bill received bipartisan support during the mark-up session, some Democrats expressed concerns about the administration's potential "open-ended" authority to block or favor certain transactions. The bill advanced to the full committee by a voice vote and will be marked up again before a final House vote. However, the bill's fate remains uncertain, as it faces a recess in the House next month before the midterms.

This congressional effort follows a public letter released in July by almost all US tech giants, including Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta, advocating for US leadership in open-weight AI models.