The launch of the latest AI model from a Chinese company, Moonshot AI’s Kimi, has reignited debates about American competitiveness and open versus proprietary AI. While there has been a lot of conversation on social media, it appears the debate is also taking place behind the scenes in Washington, DC, where OpenAI and Anthropic have
A great debate A proliferation of Chinese-made AI tools is brewing in Silicon Valley, particularly “open-weight” AI systems that, by some measures, can rival or even surpass some of the best American models. My WIRED colleague Hugo Lowell has written about the Trump administration’s internal debate over how to handle these Chinese models. Among the
At the beginning of this year, I picked up a rather unfortunate habit: vaping. More specifically, I started smoking flavored vaporizers made in the so-called “Vape Valley” of China and sold throughout the United States. Flavored nicotine vaporizers are largely illegal in the United States, yet convenience stores and tobacconists across the country have generated
Several AI companies, including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral and Nvidia, have signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models. The letter comes as Washington debates how the United States should respond to accusations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts and
As Chinese open-weight AI models grow in capability and popularity, arguments over what should be done about them have once again reached a fever pitch. There is talk that the Trump administration could try to ban them (although it has not yet acted on the idea). Meanwhile, proprietary model makers, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, seem
On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States would examine China’s open source models for signs of intellectual property theft, threatening sanctions against Chinese AI companies if intellectual property theft is found. “We’ve seen a lot of talk about open source models threatening the big language models in the United States,” Bessent said