If you pay attention to how these US CEOs talk, it'll be "safety". If I were to guess, they'll try and require a lot of testing, validation, certification before a model is legally allowed to be used in the US or on US products.

It won't be a great moat, they'll probably try and get trade treaties setup to try and expand the moat. But ultimately it won't slow down chinese model development, just limit who can legally use them.

From the frontier labs, the only publicly stated one seemed to be to give them an exception from anti-trust laws to form a cartel and place - incidentally friendly - regulators in charge of monitoring everyone's work.

From politicians like Bernie Sanders, we've had proposals like 20 year imprisonment for anyone researching "ASI".