China Weighs a 'Silicon Curtain' Restricting Foreign Access to Its Open-Source AI Models

Reuters (corroborated by Semafor, Gizmodo)·medium signal

Reuters reported that Chinese authorities spent the past month debating restrictions on overseas access to the country's most advanced AI models — including unreleased systems — in talks involving Alibaba, ByteDance, and Z.ai. Officials discussed curbing foreign access to open-weight releases, not just closed models, plus tougher AI-theft penalties under national-security law and limits on who may fund domestic AI startups. For builders this is direct supply risk: US teams that standardized on cheap Chinese open models like GLM 5.2 (see the Databricks default switch) have concentrated dependency on a policy that Beijing is actively reconsidering.