Silicon Valley and Washington are debating a multibillion-dollar question: Should American companies be able to use Chinese artificial-intelligence models?
OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting they will lead to a “dystopian” AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.
Some analysts who study the AI industry say the two companies, which are preparing for public listings in the next year, just want to eliminate the competition.
The emergence of highly capable, open autonomous AI systems—including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users—has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 also was competitive with U.S. models on some benchmarks.
The debate over the new models, which are “open weight,” allowing users to download and customize them with company data and for specific tasks, coincides with division in the Trump administration about whether to take steps to limit the use of the models in the U.S.
“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure,’” Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, said in an X post Friday.
Ball, a former Trump administration official, called such a scenario a “dystopian hellscape” and said he expected the Trump administration to make moves toward reducing the use of open-source models. Ball later clarified that he wasn’t advocating for the U.S. government to discourage Chinese AI.
He also highlighted a central challenge with the AI race: Top-tier AI companies raise billions of dollars to pay for the vast computing resources needed to continue improving AI systems. If everyone uses AI systems that people largely don’t pay for, there would be no way to finance continued frontier AI development.
Ball, who started at the company earlier this month and focuses on policy strategy, and OpenAI have said his comments don’t reflect the company’s official positions. The company has developed its own open models and Chief Executive Sam Altman has previously said OpenAI’s past approach of only developing closed tools was unwise.
Other top AI executives have warned that open models present huge risks, since developers and policymakers lack control over how they are used or modified.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for years has warned about the risks of powerful and open AI systems, saying in a recent Bloomberg interview that having AI models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that are free to download could be harmful. “It’s a serious concern,” he said in June.
Use of Chinese models, which are far cheaper than U.S. counterparts, is surging at U.S. companies, prompting some investors to question the staying power of top model-makers such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
The current U.S. open-source model frontier is starting to catch up with China’s. On Wednesday, Thinking Machines Lab—led by former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati—released its first AI model as open weight. Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra is starting to see traction, and Reflection AI, an Nvidia-backed open-model developer, has close ties to the Trump administration and plans to release its first model later this year.
The market’s faith in Anthropic and OpenAI continuing to build more capable models that push the AI frontier has been at the heart of the boom, helping to justify trillions of dollars in spending on infrastructure in the coming years. The threat that new players will vastly undercut what they can charge for advanced AI pushed down some tech and AI company stock prices last week.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist and White House AI adviser, suggested that he read Ball’s post as a confession to a “regulatory capture strategy.” Sacks and others have long seen calls for AI regulation by companies such as Anthropic as efforts to use new laws and policies to stymie competitors.
White House special adviser for AI and Crypto David Sacks speaking at a meeting.
David Sacks at the White House in 2025. Alex Brandon/AP
“The weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable,” Sacks said in an X post on Sunday.
Security-focused administration officials in the past year have considered a slew of measures to crack down on Chinese AI companies developing open models, people familiar with the discussions said. They have weighed adding the businesses to trade blacklists, security warnings on Chinese AI companies and a potential executive order targeting open models, the people said, adding that disagreement within the administration has prevented any such action.
That tension has also delayed implementation of a recent executive order asking companies to give the administration early access to their most powerful models up to 30 days before they are released. The CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet’s DeepMind have recently signaled they support increasing government oversight of AI as models become popular, fueling some criticism that the companies are trying to stifle their competition. Alphabet is the parent company of Google. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind lab, recently suggested developers of open models be included in discussions about AI regulation.
Congress restricted the use of Chinese model DeepSeek on federal and defense networks because of security and privacy concerns last year, but lawmakers and the administration have stopped short of imposing other restrictions. One challenge is that smaller model-makers—including several Chinese companies—use a technique called distillation in which they harvest the capabilities of the top U.S. tools.
Officials who have pushed for oversight of AI have worried that open models could pose cyber and biological-weapon risks if they continue advancing and don’t have to follow the same rules as top U.S. companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, the people said.
The Trump administration is committed to promoting America’s open-source ecosystem and strengthening its security, a White House official said.
The new focus on the issue shows how the messy policies surrounding open models are challenging CEOs trying to cut their AI bills and policymakers who don’t want the technology used to harm the U.S.
“AI is increasingly synonymous with power and the dual-use concerns are real. But for American businesses and most of the world, being able to run cheap, high-quality models in a way they can control is going to matter a lot,” said Austin Carson, CEO of SeedAI, an AI-policy nonprofit. “If you know about open source, you’d know that you can’t win by exclusion.”
