A new free AI model from China has triggered a public feud among President Donald Trump's current and former artificial intelligence advisors. The dispute highlights deep divisions over how the United States should respond to the growing capabilities of Chinese AI systems.
Over the weekend, several people who have advised Trump on AI took to social media to trade insults with each other and with leading US AI companies. David Sacks, who served as the president's AI and crypto czar until March, described Anthropic's models as lobotomized and woke. Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official, called OpenAI's new head of strategic futures a supreme village idiot.
The Kimi Problem
The conflict started because nobody can agree on what to do about Kimi. The Chinese AI company Moonshot launched the free, open-source model last week. Kimi appears to match the intelligence of models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which cost money to use.
Kimi and similar Chinese models create a real dilemma for Trump. They are dividing the top AI strategists in his circle into opposing factions. Every time a smart, free model from China gets released, US companies have less reason to pay for access to models from Anthropic or OpenAI. Since enthusiasm for these AI companies drives a large share of economic growth, Chinese AI models create both economic and political problems for the president.
Anton Leicht, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, wrote on X that these models are a threat for an administration that really does not want more economic bad news. The models have already rattled US stocks.
What Can Trump Do?
All of this is happening just one week after New York imposed the first state ban on new data centers in the country. There is growing distrust of AI companies. Many Americans would have little sympathy for OpenAI or Anthropic as they face cheaper competitors. They would say it is not the government's job to protect their interests.
On that point, they would find a sliver of agreement with David Sacks. On July 19, Sacks criticized top AI companies that want the government to eliminate their open-source competition. He has also argued that Chinese AI models have become popular because they come with fewer restrictions on how people can use them, setting aside the built-in state censorship.
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Sacks, however, no longer has a formal role advising Trump. His position that more open AI is better has been largely replaced in the administration by a view that sees a larger role for government intervention. The thinking behind this view is that AI models have become strong enough to pose threats to national security, so the government must control how they are used.
The Licensing Debate
This position has fueled the new White House review process that aims to vet AI models' security before they are released. Dean Ball, a former Trump AI advisor who now works for OpenAI, criticized it over the weekend. He called it a de facto licensing regime for frontier AI. Ball predicted that Trump may solve his Chinese open-source problem with a bit of soft power, perhaps by making US companies afraid to use models like Kimi.
That drew a response from Michael. Along with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Michael has been the Pentagon's main liaison with AI companies. Michael called Ball the AI industry's supreme village idiot. He bristled at the suggestion that the government would quietly strong-arm companies rather than go through the democratic process, not some Deep State scheme.
How Did Kimi Get So Good?
Left out of the conversation has been how a model like Kimi got so good in the first place. For much of the Biden administration and even the beginning of Trump's second administration, keeping China from getting top chips was a priority. Those export controls have loosened. Trump made the controversial decision to allow Nvidia to sell more chips to China, in exchange for the US government taking a cut. The government has also alleged that some chip smuggling has taken place. But China nonetheless has limited computing power, and it is not clear what chips the company behind Kimi used to train the model.
It is possible that the process involved some distillation. Distillation is a practice in which AI models are trained on the outputs of existing AI models. OpenAI and Anthropic have long complained that Chinese AI companies do this, and they have requested government help to put a stop to it. In April, they got that help when the Trump administration announced a series of efforts to curb the practice.
But Kimi is out there and free. It is nearly as good as the Anthropic model that the US government deemed so powerful it was briefly shut down because it threatened national security. The weekend's sparring suggests many in Trump's orbit see that as a wake-up call. But nobody can agree on what for.