What happens if China pulls the plug on open-source AI? | Ep 21

What happens if China pulls the plug on open-source AI? | Ep 21

From This Week in AI by Jason Calacanis

July 9, 2026 · 1h 21m · Episode 21

About this episode

The episode discusses the potential impact on US companies if China restricts access to open-source AI models.

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL Today’s show: China is weighing a ban on foreign access to its top AI models… the same low-cost open-weight systems on which half of the Valley’s startups are building. So we asked our two all-star panelists — Arena CEO/Co-Founder Anastasios Angelopoulos and Hippocratic AI CEO/Co-Founder Munjal Shah — what happens to US companies when their favorite cheap, powerful models vaporize overnight. PLUS why Hippocratic runs 31 models in parallel to ensure clinical-grade safety, the latency-vs-intelligence tradeoff no one is optimizing for, and why a company’s benchmarks might become their most valuable IP. Guests: Anastasios Angelopoulos on X: https://x.com/ml_angelopoulos Arena AI: https://arena.ai/ Agent Arena: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent Munjal Shah on X: https://x.com/munjalshah Hippocratic AI: https://hippocraticai.com/ Relevant Links: Reuters: “Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access…”: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-overseas-access-chinas-top-ai-models-sources-say-2026-07-07/ Z.ai : https://z.ai/ Alibaba’s Qwen: https://qwen.ai/ Google’s Gemma: https://ai.google.dev/gemma Reflection AI…

People in this episode

Host: Jason Calacanis

Guests: Anastasios Angelopoulos, Munjal Shah

Topics covered

Keywords

Sponsors

PAYPAL

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Hippocratic AI, Arena AI, Nvidia, DoorDash, Alibaba, Google, Harvey AI

Places: China

More episodes of This Week in AI

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the This Week in AI podcast page.