A new Chinese AI model called Kimi has sparked a heated debate among former and current advisors to President Donald Trump over the US AI strategy. The free and open-source model, launched by Moonshot last week, appears to be competing with leading systems from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The dispute turned personal over the weekend, with David Sacks, Trump's former AI and crypto adviser, criticizing 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 continue to release powerful models for free, businesses may have less reason to pay for access to models from OpenAI and Anthropic.