Trump AI Advisers Feud Over China's Free Kimi Model
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- Moonshot launched Kimi last week, a free, open-source AI model the article says appears to rival the intelligence of paid OpenAI and Anthropic systems and has already rattled US stocks.
- David Sacks, Trump's AI and crypto czar until March, branded Anthropic's models "lobotomized" and "woke," while Pentagon official Emil Michael called OpenAI's new head of strategic futures the AI industry's "supreme village idiot."
- Dean Ball, a former Trump AI adviser now working for OpenAI, criticized the White House's new AI security review process as a "de facto licensing regime for frontier AI" and predicted Trump may pressure US firms away from models like Kimi through soft power.
- Sacks argued on July 19 that Chinese AI models became popular because they carry fewer usage restrictions, and attacked top US AI companies that "want the government to eliminate their open source competition."
- Trump loosened chip export controls to China, controversially allowing Nvidia to sell more chips in exchange for the US government taking a cut, even as the government alleged chip smuggling had occurred.
- In April, the Trump administration announced a series of efforts to curb AI distillation—the practice of training models on existing model outputs—which OpenAI and Anthropic say Chinese firms use against them.
- A week before Kimi's release, New York imposed the country's first state ban on new data centers, signaling the eroding public trust that limits the administration's appetite to bail out US AI companies.
Why it matters: The infighting exposes a core contradiction: the same administration that loosened chip export controls to China is now scrambling to counter the AI progress those chips may have enabled. With New York banning new data centers and public trust in AI companies falling, the White House has little political cover to shield OpenAI and Anthropic—yet letting cheaper Chinese models undercut US AI firms threatens the tech-driven growth narrative powering Trump's economic messaging.
