Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushes back on U.S. moves against Chinese open-source AI

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang pushed back against U.S. efforts to fence out Chinese open-source AI models as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned of possible sanctions over alleged intellectual property theft, The Next Web reported, citing Huang's comments to Axios. Bessent said the United States will scrutinize Chinese open-source models for stolen intellectual property, as Bloomberg first reported, and could then hit their makers with sanctions. He said the administration supports open-source models but not IP theft, pointing to watermarks of U.S. large language models found on many Chinese models and describing distillation of model outputs as theft, with action promised within weeks. The Next Web said the latest flare-up was triggered by Kimi K3, an open-weight model from China's Moonshot AI that matches or beats leading U.S. systems on some benchmarks at far lower cost and that helped spark a chip-stock selloff. Huang, speaking to Axios at a new chip plant in Texas, called the panic misplaced, said the Chinese models are excellent, and argued that excellent open-source models should be used and that American firms should be allowed to run them. Huang's commercial case, per the report, is that cheaper free models put AI in more hands and raise demand for chips, data centers, and power. He rejected the idea that a downloaded Chinese model is automatically a backdoor to Beijing, saying firms can wall models off in secure sandboxes. Hugging Face chief Clem Delangue told TechCrunch that distillation is a very small factor and a practice used by companies in the United States as well. The Next Web said Bessent will lead the U.S. side at AI talks with China in September, with the distillation fight on the table, highlighting a split between government moves to restrict Chinese models and the world's most valuable chipmaker urging wider use.