static01.nyt.com
static01.nyt.com is blocked
This page has been blocked by an extension
- Try disabling your extensions.
ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT
Reload
This page has been blocked by an extension
Advertisement
Trump administration officials have struggled over the past few weeks with what to do about artificial intelligence.
In particular, a group that includes White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have debated whether or not to take a far more interventionist approach to “open source” A.I. models, which are freely available to download and modify, said more than a half-dozen current and former tech and government officials and other people familiar with the matter.
Senior officials have considered a range of actions, including using sanctions, a trade blacklist against Chinese companies that make these open-source A.I. models, or even banning U.S. cloud companies from doing business with them, said five of the people, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. But after an outcry from Silicon Valley, they appear to have changed their minds and instead are focused on promoting American A.I. models to be more competitive, the people said.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration’s A.I. plans may become clearer. The White House has invited U.S. tech companies to discuss a framework that would allow the government to review new A.I. models for cybersecurity issues before they are released publicly, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
“This is all happening so fast,” said Senator Jon Husted, Republican of Ohio, last week after he met with the chief executives of Nvidia and OpenAI. “I don’t know that I have any definite conclusions about any of it.”
The whiplash is a sign of the Trump administration’s conflicting impulses when it comes to A.I. and the difficulties of handling such a quickly developing and powerful technology. The White House has aggressively intervened in swathes of the economy over the last 18 months, from media to computer chip manufacturing to mining. But A.I. is changing rapidly and the government has scrambled to determine how to put its thumb on the scale.
President Trump began his second term as an unabashed A.I. booster, peeling back regulations and forging close relationships with A.I. companies and start-ups. But that changed in June when Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would give the government oversight over new A.I. models. Since then, the technology has continued to evolve quickly.
The most recent debates were prompted by a surge in powerful new Chinese A.I. models, which are known as “open source,” where the public can see the underlying computer code, or “ open weight,” where companies reveal the calculations used to generate answers to questions.
In Silicon Valley, the response to these Chinese A.I. models varied wildly. OpenAI and Anthropic, which generally do not share the underlying technology of their models, pushed the government to rein in their Chinese rivals, citing national security.
Other U.S. tech companies that produce open-source models, including Nvidia, pushed back. They argued that open-source models encourage innovation and could be used to defend computer systems from cyberattacks.
Which side comes out on top has taken on new significance in the long-running fight between Washington and Beijing over which nation will control critical technologies and win the A.I. race. Raising the stakes, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is set to visit Washington in September for meetings that are expected to include some discussion of A.I. Industry executives and analysts said they believed the administration was unlikely to take action before that visit.
Image
Jensen Huang with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in the Oval office last week. Mr. Huang had brought his case for open source A.I. products directly to administration officials.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
“The United States leads the world in A.I. innovation, and President Trump’s successful approach will keep it that way,” said Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman. The Department of Commerce declined to comment.
The debate heated up last month, as executives at Anthropic and OpenAI continued regulatory discussions after the release of Moonshot AI’s Kimi, a bleeding-edge Chinese model that performed on par with top models from the two American companies in some areas, two of the people familiar with the companies’ positions said.
OpenAI and Anthropic also expressed concerns about “distillation,” when a model is developed based on the responses of a different A.I. tool, essentially creating a copy, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Image
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI in Washington last week to discuss the administration’s efforts to create a framework governing the testing of A.I.Credit...Alex Kent/The New York Times
The administration echoed those concerns. Michael Kratsios, who leads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, posted last month on X that the Chinese company that makes Kimi had distilled Anthropic’s powerful Fable model.
He warned that “stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable.”
The same day, Mr. Bessent posted that Chinese companies could face sanctions or other federal restrictions over stealing intellectual property.
The administration has also considered restricting the models that can be used by the federal government, or regulating information and communication technology through the Department of Commerce, a potential way to prevent U.S. firms from doing business with Chinese A.I. companies, four people familiar with the discussions said.
“We believe both open-weight and closed models have an important role to play in democratizing access to AI,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. “Advances in Chinese open-weight models are not an argument against openness. They reinforce the need for a coherent national framework that enables the U.S. to evaluate new models quickly, manage risks, and get the most powerful AI tools into the hands of cyber defenders.”
Anthropic declined to comment.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.)
At Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and Meta, executives grew increasingly concerned that Anthropic and OpenAI would win over the White House with their arguments for tighter restrictions, according to two of the people. That would potentially cement the A.I. start-ups’ positions as market leaders,
Other A.I. labs were at risk of falling permanently behind, the people added. And because several of the companies make their own open-source models or supply hardware to businesses that use open-source technology, they worried the restrictions could harm them.
Over private texts, phone calls and video conferences, executives quietly built an argument that open-source models were good for the world and for American innovation, according to three of the people familiar with the talks.
Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, became the face of that pushback in the nation’s capital. In his first-ever post on X on July 24, he defended open-source models, saying they accelerated innovation and strengthened security. Nvidia set up an alliance of companies pledging to work on open-source tools for A.I. safety, which quickly ballooned from a few members to more than 230.
Christopher Padilla, a former Commerce Department official and tech executive, said the clash was primarily an industry debate about money and market dominance — what he called a “cage match over the future of the A.I. industry.”
“It happens to have a national security dimension, but it’s mainly a fight about what the A.I. market should look like: a collection of walled gardens dominated by a few big players, or a more open free-for-all with many smaller ones,” he said.
A spokesman for Nvidia declined to comment.
Fueling the debate are recent revelations from OpenAI and Anthropic that their models had, unprompted, hacked other organizations. OpenAI said last month that two of its A.I. models had infiltrated Hugging Face, another tech company. Anthropic last week said that its own technology had hacked into three unnamed organizations, partly because of human error.
Last week, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, met with White House officials including Mr. Kratsios and Ms. Wiles to discuss the administration’s efforts to create a framework governing the testing of A.I. He also met with members of the Senate, though several lawmakers said the open-source debate had not come up.
By the time Mr. Altman appeared in Washington, Mr. Huang was already bringing his case for open-source A.I. products directly to administration officials and to lawmakers in a series of Capitol Hill meetings.
“He makes a compelling argument,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, after meeting with Mr. Huang last week, adding that the rise of Chinese open-source A.I. models had complicated the debate. “I’m not sure this is a genie we can put back in the bottle in terms of open source, but I’m still thinking this through.”
Kalley Huang contributed reporting.
David McCabe is a Times reporter who covers the complex legal and policy issues created by the digital economy and new technologies.
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at kate.conger@nytimes.com.
- Share full article
Related Content
Advertisement
The New York Times
Read Original at The New York Times →