The White House Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About Chinese AI
There’s a debate going on in the Trump administration over how to handle increasingly powerful Chinese AI models.
The Trump administration is split over how to respond to the rapid rise of China’s leading AI models , according to multiple people familiar with deliberations.
The debate is broadly divided between parts of the White House, which has pushed for stricter controls on Chinese AI that may soon rival the most powerful US models, and the Commerce Department, which has viewed those restrictions as unworkable.
The conundrum has become the latest flash point for the administration over AI, after China’s Moonshot AI lab last week released its Kimi K3 model that rivals the top US models from Anthropic and OpenAI .
In recent days, senior White House officials have discussed possible measures to stop China’s AI labs from developing their models by training them on US models, a practice known as distillation, the people say.
The White House is expected to take some sort of presidential action after Anthropic last month alleged the Chinese tech company Alibaba had carried out the “largest known distillation attack” against it to date. This action is not currently expected to take the form of an executive order, according to one of the people.
A White House spokesperson did not comment on the reporting in this story.
