US Treasury Secretary Bessent threatens sanctions against Chinese AI model makers
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said today that the White House is going to examine some of the highest profile “open-weight” models from China to see if their creators have stolen the intellectual property of America’s top artificial intelligence frontier labs.
If evidence suggests that’s the case, the U.S. could respond with sanctions against the Chinese firms found guilty, he said.
In an interview with Fox Business, Bessent (pictured) said the Trump administration supports open-source models, but is dead against 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,” he said.
Bessent’s comments come just days after one of China’s hottest AI startups, Moonshot AI, unveiled a new open-weights model called Kimi K3 that matches the performance of OpenAI Group PBC’s and Anthropic PBC’s most advanced models. Chinese models are becoming increasingly popular with U.S. businesses, because they’re seen as more than good enough in terms of their capabilities, and cost far less money thanks to their open-source nature. It’s a trend that threatens to derail the business models of America’s top AI labs and prevent them from raising further capital.
