What Trump's AI framework means for China
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The White House's AI framework takes a hands-off approach to open models, raising new questions about how the administration plans to tackle security concerns posed by Chinese labs.
Why it matters: The Trump administration's decision to leave open models outside its AI framework puts the focus now on its approach to Chinese models.
The big picture: The AI framework is built around voluntary cooperation with AI developers, not labs from adversarial nations.
- "This was never going to be the right tool for Kimi K3 or Qwen," said Joseph Hoefer, AI principal at Monument Advocacy, referring to advanced open models from China's Moonshot and Alibaba.
- Under the framework, companies can submit closed models voluntarily to the government, which then reviews them under agreed-upon security terms.
The framework relies on voluntary cooperation from companies seeking to be in the U.S. government's "good graces," said a source familiar with the discussions.
- "China doesn't care about that."
Catch up quick: The White House does not plan to publicly release the framework, which explicitly says nothing in it should be interpreted as restricting open models once they've been released, Axios first reported.
- "The covered-model framework is a pre-release cooperation mechanism," Hoefer told Axios. "Restricting Chinese model use is an access and procurement fight that's still being negotiated separately."
What we're watching: There are other tools at the U.S. government's disposal that could be used to address Chinese open models.
- Last year, the Trump administration considered an executive order that would allow U.S. companies to host Chinese AI models only if they could guarantee their security and accept liability for any resulting breaches.
- The Commerce Department also weighed using the Entity List — effectively cutting off U.S. access without a license — and supply chain-based restrictions, while the National Security Agency and White House Office of the National Cyber Director considered an advisory discouraging Chinese model use, Axios previously reported.
- Top Trump administration officials in recent weeks have grown louder about Chinese intellectual property theft via distillation — the process of training a smaller AI model using the outputs of a larger model — and could opt for those tools.
What they're saying: Some experts argue the framework risks creating an uneven playing field that could give Chinese competitors an edge.
- "There's a huge overlap between the best open-source models and the best Chinese models," Brookings' Kyle Chan told Axios. "The administration seems more afraid of a closed AI oligopoly than of competition from Chinese AI models."
- Former Biden White House AI adviser Suresh Venkatasubramanian said the framework's treatment of open models could give Chinese open-source companies a "boost, which is probably not what they want."
The bottom line: The administration this week drew a clear distinction between U.S. open and closed models.
- How the administration plans to deal with Chinese open models is far from resolved.
