The Trump administration considered sanctions and trade bans targeting Chinese open-source AI models, according to the New York Times. After pushback from Silicon Valley, it backed off for now.
According to reporting by the New York Times, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent recent weeks debating whether the government should intervene far more aggressively in the open-source AI market. The paper cites more than half a dozen current and former government and industry officials.
Five of those sources said the options on the table included sanctions, a trade blacklist targeting Chinese makers of open models, and even a ban on US cloud companies doing business with those firms. Officials also discussed which models federal agencies should be allowed to use and whether the Commerce Department should impose new rules. After an outcry from Silicon Valley, the administration shifted course and is now focused on making American models more competitive, the NYT reports.
The push came after a wave of powerful Chinese models, led by Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI, which matches top US models in several areas. Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, accused the company on X of distilling Anthropic's model Fable, calling the theft of US technology "unacceptable." Bessent floated sanctions the same day.
