Kaiwei Tang helped create the iconic Motorola Razr over 20 years ago. Now, 10 years into building Light, the startup behind the minimalist smartphone alternative Light Phone, he’s as surprised as anyone that his customers are begging for a flip phone.

“We’ve been interviewing young people that use flip phones for a few years,” Tang told TechCrunch, describing a pattern his team kept running into: Gen Z users love their flip phones but say the build quality is bad. “They’re describing the flip phones in negative language, but they stick with it, and they feel proud.”

So Tang and co-founder Joe Hollier had an idea. What if Light took the fast, custom software from its last three touch screen phones and put it into a flip phone? That’s how they decided to build the Light Flip, the most affordable device that Light has ever released.

“What we’re doing is offering the same Light Phone experience, the same Light Phone OS with our SDK developer program, all of the tools we already have today: alarm, calculator, calendar,” Hollier told TechCrunch. “It’s kind of the exact same experience, just one is fully tactile, no touch screen, and [the other] one is a complete touch screen experience.”

Pricing has always been Light’s hardest problem as a small hardware startup. How do you sell a “less” phone for a price people will actually pay, when the whole pitch is fewer features? Its previous release, the unlocked Light Phone III, retails at $799. But the Light Flip brings the cost down to $299 by foregoing a touch screen, NFC reader, and selfie camera. The Light Flip is also made of plastic, rather than sturdier aluminum, but that means that for the first time, Light can offer one of its phones in a range of colors: black, red, yellow, pink, navy blue, and light gray.

“I thought I was fully QWERTY, but I was having fun with the T9 predictive texting [the old-school method of typing multiple letters per number], so I can see myself going flip phone also for the colors,” Hollier said. “Just having a yellow phone gets me so jazzed.”

Beyond the sticker price, Light is also testing a financing play. It recently piloted phone contracts with Andrew Yang’s anti-doomscrolling carrier Noble Mobile. With Light’s own service plan, customers can get the Light Flip for a two-year contract at $39 per month; the Light Phone III will be available for $59 per month over the same time frame.

The Light Flip only has a 2.8″ OLED screen on the inside and no screen on the outside, as requested by users. There will be a small light on the front of the phone, however, so that you can see if you have notifications without flipping open the device. With 5G and 4G LTE connectivity, the Light Flip can download podcasts online and play music that you upload to your phone, which you can listen to via either a 3.5 mm headphone jack or Bluetooth headphones. It charges via USB-C, works with both eSIM and physical Nano SIM cards, and includes a 12-megapixel camera on the back.

The Light Flip is expected to ship in April 2027, which Light acknowledges is a long lead time. To keep preorder customers engaged (and, practically, to keep them from canceling before it ships), the company is launching a new “Flip Your Life” program, including bi-weekly newsletters to help people prepare for the lifestyle adjustment of ditching a smartphone. It’s a community-building move as much as a marketing one. By building a support network around the phone, Light hopes that the transition to using its products will be less jarring and that it sticks.

While Light believes that its phones can help people reclaim the time they may regret spending on mindless scrolling, the founders acknowledge that it’s not easy to quit smartphones cold turkey. It’s hard to sacrifice the convenience of instant internet access, Apple Pay, music streaming, and convenient communication tools like WhatsApp and iMessage, and it’s easier for the flip phone-curious to make this transition when they’re not going through it alone.

“I think something that’s so inspiring about this movement is it’s not coming from a place of just anger and hatred … It’s a movement of optimism, as well as skepticism,” Hollier said. “I think that’s what we’ve always tried to do with Light. We’re anti Big Tech in all these ways, but we’re always trying to show that the other side of life can be really simple and beautiful.”

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would examine open source models from China for signs of intellectual property theft, threatening sanctions against Chinese AI companies if IP theft is established. 

“We’ve seen a lot of talk about open source models coming and threatening the large language models in the U.S.,” Bessent said on Fox Business Tuesday. “This administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.”

Bessent’s comments were first reported by Bloomberg.

The statement comes as Chinese models — most recently Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 — are gaining in capabilities and popularity, threatening to harm the business models of top American AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as their abilities to raise more capital to continue developing frontier models. 

On Monday, Axios reported that the Trump administration is considering a wholesale ban on Chinese open source models, although others have disputed that claim.

AI companies have been warning for months against campaigns by foreign actors to copy their AI technology and redeploy it as open source. In April, the White House said it would work closely with AI firms to combat the theft.

Sanctions from the U.S. against Chinese models would add to the growing list of strategies the government is attempting to maintain the lead in the AI race. After restricting China’s access to advanced chips and tightening export controls, Washington is now signaling it may target the AI models themselves, a move that could mark a significant escalation in the technological competition between frontier labs and Chinese open source alternatives.

Model distillation is a technique that allows some of a larger model’s capabilities to be translated into a smaller system that’s easier to run — but not everyone agrees that distilling another company’s model constitutes theft.

Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella criticized large labs for making just this assumption: “While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation.”

AI labs’ training practices continue to be a source of legal risk for the companies. Anthropic this week got the green light to start cutting authors checks as part of its $1.5 billion settlement after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books to train its AI.

Furthermore, some in the industry argue that distillation isn’t the only reason China is catching up to U.S. AI companies. 

“We know distillation to be a very small factor in the ability to create good models, and it’s a practice that everyone is doing, including companies in the U.S.,” Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. “If it were easy just to do distillation to get good at building AI models, there would be many other countries, including in the U.S., with much better open source AI. The reality is they have really, really good research teams in China…taking a much more open and collaborative approach to AI than in the U.S.”

Meta is bringing parental supervision tools to Threads, the company announced on Tuesday. With the new tools, parents and guardians will be able to view their teen’s time spent on Threads, set daily time limits, adjust sleep mode, and manage their privacy settings through Family Center, Meta’s hub for parental controls across its apps.

The rollout follows growing pressure on Meta from regulators and lawmakers to better protect young users online. The company has spent the last several years expanding parental controls across its apps in response to concerns over excessive screen time, harmful content, and teen safety, and is now bringing similar controls to Threads. It’s also worth noting that Meta, alongside other social media giants, is currently facing numerous lawsuits related to child safety.

Given these factors, it’s not surprising that Meta is finally introducing parental supervision tools to Threads, a platform with 500 million monthly users. The rollout comes three years after Threads’ launch in July 2023.

Parents and guardians will now be able to view how much time their teen spent on the platform each day for the past week, including their average daily time spent for the week. They will also be able to set a daily time limit and block access during select days and hours. If a teen uses Threads across multiple devices, like their phone and laptop, the time limit will apply to the total time spent using Threads.

Additionally, parents can limit or block their teen’s access to Threads at night, with notifications muted and auto-replies already on by default for all teens from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Parents also have the option to control who can tag their teen in posts on the platform.

Meta notes that teens on Threads already have built-in protections like private accounts and limits on the content they see. However, parents can now decide if teens under 16 can change any of these automatic settings to be less strict, the company says.

The parental supervision controls are rolling out next week in the U.S. Meta is planning to bring parental supervision on Threads globally by the end of the year, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.