Mark Zuckerberg has come out against one of Washington’s favourite ideas about artificial intelligence: that the way to beat China is to shut its models out.
In an interview with the Financial Times published this week, Meta’s chief executive said banning advanced Chinese AI from use in the United States is “not an effective solution.”
His case is competitive rather than sentimental. Instead of building a wall, Zuckerberg argued, the US should work out where it is actually behind and fix those bottlenecks, a position that puts him alongside the startups urging Trump not to ban Chinese open-weight models.
He was not only talking about China. In the same breath he took aim at rivals closer to home, implicitly criticising OpenAI and Anthropic for pressing government to restrict powerful “frontier” models, an approach he cast as concentrating power in too few hands.
Openness, in his telling, is the natural direction of travel. “The big trend in the industry’s development has always been towards greater openness, putting technological power in the hands of more people, not fewer,” he told the paper.
