A new Chinese AI model has triggered a public split among current and former AI advisors linked to President Donald Trump.
The dispute centers on Kimi, a free and open-source AI model launched by Chinese company Moonshot last week. The model appears to compete with leading systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are not free.
The debate turned personal over the weekend. David Sacks, Trump’s former AI and crypto adviser, criticized Anthropic’s models as “lobotomized” and “woke.” Emil Michael, a senior Pentagon official, called OpenAI’s new head of strategic futures a “supreme village idiot.”
The argument shows how China’s fast-improving open-source AI models are dividing people in Trump’s orbit.
Kimi creates a difficult problem for the US AI industry.
If Chinese companies keep releasing powerful models for free, businesses may have less reason to pay for access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other US companies.
That creates both an economic and political challenge for Trump. AI companies have become a major part of the market’s growth story, and cheaper Chinese models could put pressure on their valuations.
Sacks has argued that open models should not be restricted just because they compete with US companies.
On July 19, he criticized AI companies that want the government to remove their open-source competition. He has also said Chinese models are gaining attention partly because they place fewer restrictions on how users interact with them, although they still carry Chinese state censorship.
However, Sacks no longer has a formal role in the Trump administration.
Inside the administration, another view appears to be gaining ground.
That view argues that powerful AI models are now serious enough to require government security reviews before release. This has helped drive a new White House process for reviewing frontier AI models.
Dean Ball, a former Trump AI advisor who now works for OpenAI, criticized the process as a possible “de facto licensing regime for frontier AI.”
Ball suggested Trump could respond to Chinese open-source models through soft power, including making US companies afraid to use models like Kimi.
That comment drew a sharp response from Michael, who rejected the idea that the government would pressure companies quietly instead of acting through a formal democratic process.
The rise of Kimi also raises a major hardware question.
For years, US policy focused on limiting China’s access to advanced AI chips. Export controls were meant to slow Chinese AI development by restricting access to Nvidia’s most powerful GPUs.
However, Kimi’s performance has renewed questions about what chips Chinese labs are actually using and whether they can train strong models with limited compute.
The source of Kimi’s training hardware remains unclear.
Another concern is model distillation.
Distillation is a process where one AI model is trained on the outputs of another. OpenAI and Anthropic have previously complained that Chinese AI companies use this technique to improve their own models.
The Trump administration announced measures in April aimed at limiting the practice.
Still, Kimi is now available and free, making the policy debate more urgent.
The dispute shows that Trump’s AI allies agree China’s open-source models are a serious challenge.
They do not agree on the response.
Some want more open competition. Others want stronger government oversight because frontier AI could affect national security.
For now, Kimi has exposed a larger problem for Washington: Chinese AI labs are releasing capable, low-cost models faster than US policymakers can agree on how to respond.
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