Silicon Valley and Washington are debating a multibillion-dollar question: Should American companies be able to use Chinese artificial-intelligence models? OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting they will lead to a “dystopian” AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.

Some analysts who study the AI industry say the two companies, which are preparing for public listings in the next year, just want to eliminate the competition.

The emergence of highly capable, open autonomous AI systems—including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users—has turned the AI race on its head once again.

Kimi K3 also was competitive with U.S.

models on some benchmarks.

The debate over the new models, which are “open weight,” allowing users to download and customize them with company data and for specific tasks, coincides with division in the Trump administration about whether to take steps to limit the use of the models in the U.S.

“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure,’” Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, said in an X post Friday.

Ball, a former Trump administration official, called such a scenario a “dystopian hellscape” and said he expected the Trump administration to make moves toward reducing the use of open-source models.

Ball later clarified that he wasn’t advocating for the U.S.

government to discourage Chinese AI.

He also highlighted a central challenge with the AI race: Top-tier AI companies raise billions of dollars to pay for the vast computing resources needed to continue improving AI systems.

If everyone uses AI systems that people largely don’t pay for, there would be no way to finance continued frontier AI development.

Ball, who started at the company earlier this month and focuses on policy strategy, and OpenAI have said his comments don’t reflect the company’s official positions.

The company has developed its own open models and Chief Executive Sam Altman has previously said OpenAI’s past approach of only developing closed tools was unwise.

Other top AI executives have warned that open models present huge risks, since developers and policymakers lack control over how they are used or modified.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for years has warned about the risks of powerful and open AI systems, saying in a recent Bloomberg interview that having AI models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that are free to download could be harmful.

“It’s a serious concern,” he said in June.

Use of Chinese models, which are far cheaper than U.S.

counterparts, is surging at U.S.

companies, prompting some investors to question the staying power of top model-makers such....