Treasury Secretary says it's 'unacceptable' that Chinese open source AI models may have been built on 'IP theft'

tech

Treasury Secretary says it's 'unacceptable' that Chinese open source AI models may have been built on 'IP theft'

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration is looking into whether Chinese open source AI models were built on stolen IP.

TL;DR

The Trump administration is investigating Chinese open-source AI models for potential intellectual property theft.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that 'distillation' of US AI models by Chinese companies constitutes theft.
Sanctions are a potential consequence if IP theft is confirmed.
Companies like Anthropic have previously accused Chinese firms of using their research without permission.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model is noted for its advanced performance, rivaling leading US proprietary models.
There is an ongoing debate in the tech industry regarding the US government's role in responding to Chinese open-source AI.
Meta, Nvidia, and Reflection AI are mentioned as US companies pursuing open-source models.

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Aravind Srinivas reposted

Chamath Palihapitiya

The future is open source. We need to embrace it and get on with it.

Imagine if America closed the door on open source.

We would explicitly be forcing American companies to pay $26-56 per 1MM tokens for the same intelligence their adversaries/competitors around the world would pay $0.50-1 for.

This is economically unsustainable unless AI is bullshit.

If it’s the supposed through line of all future economic activity that we’ve been told it is, we can’t handicap America at such a meaningful cost disadvantage.

This can also be viewed thru a military lens and not just a simple economic one as well.

Letting our adversaries attack us for $0.50 per 1MM tokens while we spend $26-56 per 1MM tokens to defend ourselves is equally ruinous.

It’s the Cold War Soviet collapse in reverse.

Yann LeCun reposted

Chamath Palihapitiya

The future is open source. We need to embrace it and get on with it.

Imagine if America closed the door on open source.

We would explicitly be forcing American companies to pay $26-56 per 1MM tokens for the same intelligence their adversaries/competitors around the world would pay $0.50-1 for.

This is economically unsustainable unless AI is bullshit.

If it’s the supposed through line of all future economic activity that we’ve been told it is, we can’t handicap America at such a meaningful cost disadvantage.

This can also be viewed thru a military lens and not just a simple economic one as well.

Letting our adversaries attack us for $0.50 per 1MM tokens while we spend $26-56 per 1MM tokens to defend ourselves is equally ruinous.

It’s the Cold War Soviet collapse in reverse.

David Sacks

I’m not sure whether Dean Ball is confessing to a regulatory capture strategy or simply predicting this will happen (he now says the latter). Either way, the weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable.

He argues there’s no need to ban Chinese open-source models — just direct agencies to issue soft-law warnings that create enough FUD so regulated enterprises back off. “It needn’t be that well justified.”

Wrong. Regulatory decisions should always be well justified and grounded in facts, logic, and evidence, not the deliberate exploitation of fear and uncertainty. Implementing a surreptitious policy through manufactured doubt — rather than strong and explicit justification — corrodes the rule of law and invites future abuse against anyone.

We are at a critical inflection point in AI policy. The leading closed labs, already a duopoly in terms of AI model revenue, want the government to eliminate their open source competition. They have laid their cards on the table. It is time for the rest of Silicon Valley — the vast majority that still values open competition — to do the same.

clem 🤗

The cybersecurity debate on open-source AI is backwards. Open models aren't the risk, they're the defense! Attackers can already jailbreak any API or guardrails. Defenders can't secure systems with black boxes they can't control, inspect, test, or run locally. https://t.co/OiQ4sMd2gW

David Sacks reposted

MTS

Sriram Krishnan reveals why it's easier to defend American code with a Chinese model than an American one right now:

"I don't think it is great that the leading open weight models or open source models are not American. There's some great innovation happening with Moonshot and with DeepSeek and with Qwen, but I would much rather prefer that the leading models are American."

"Linus Torvalds of Linux fame had a law that given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. Open weight models are inherently secure because when you download a model off Hugging Face, the entire world can take it apart, inspect it, fine-tune it, look at it in ways that you absolutely cannot if they are closed."

"There was an incident with Hugging Face that got reported on earlier today. Hugging Face seems to have found that somebody was using an AI LLM agent to hammer them at multiple places and to find ways to break in."

"The way to counter that is to make sure American or Western or allies defenders have access to the best models to make our software just more secure."

"It may be harder to look at your own code for exploits with Fable than it is when you use a Chinese model. That's just like a weird spot to be, and I think we should fix that."

@sriramk

Yann LeCun reposted

Jitendra MALIK

Highly performant open weights frontier models such as Kimi are a competitive threat to OpenAI & Anthropic, but probably for everyone else these are a win. Hope more US entities will release top quality open weights models as well. Government regulation of AI models to prevent public harm could be done equally for proprietary or open weight models. Classic arguments in favor of open source software apply to AI models too.

Aravind Srinivas

Everything is a distillation of Schmidhuber.

Sam Altman

i want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and i am glad to see this

Mark Zuckerberg

Open source is a positive and important force for both empowering people and preventing centralization. Proud to support this.

David Sacks reposted

Chief Nerd

DAVID SACKS: “Here's the thing that's so hypocritical … OpenAI's argument is we're not stealing anything. We're taking the output of the NYT and we are deriving our own model weights. That's exactly what these Chinese models are doing.” https://t.co/ZZ3QRmSTRG

Yann LeCun reposted

Julian Togelius

Right now we are defending open source (or open weights) models' right to exist. The debate is not about forcing anyone to open-source their models, whatever some other Julian might imply. However, what if we did just that? Last year, I explored that scenario. https://t.co/R8oxnPJ9em

clem 🤗 reposted

Rohan Paul

Banning open source model, will "remove capabilities for the defenders"

When OpenAI's models breached Huggingface, a Chinese open model is what cleaned up the mess.

Anthropic's Fable 5 refused, so Hugging Face turned to Nvidia's quantized GLM 5.2.

https://t.co/km0tPh8VPO