White House AI crackdown opens door for China to close gap

The Trump administration's crackdown on Anthropic's leading artificial intelligence models is looking like a gift to the country's top adversary in the AI race: China

After a two-week shutdown due to an export control directive, Anthropic was allowed by the White House on Friday to release its powerful Mythos 5 model to some companies and federal agencies, though its Fable 5 model remains off the market. OpenAI, meanwhile, also said on Friday it would limit the rollout of its GPT 5.6 models following a government request.

The two leading U.S. AI model developers have been in a race against each other and tech giants like Google to develop the most advanced technology, with the U.S. government opening the door to speedy AI development by limiting regulatory hurdles. Doing otherwise, according to many tech execs and Trump administration officials, would restrict domestic AI to the benefit of China, which has been rapidly catching up to the U.S.

But as Anthropic adheres to the U.S. government's national security concerns, Chinese companies are launching models that rival frontier labs in some capabilities. According to researchers, Zhipu's GLM 5.2, released earlier this month, can perform on par with top U.S. labs on some cyber benchmarks, even equaling Mythos' capabilities.

"Many smart people/AI insiders are saying GLM-5.2 is the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat the American big lab public AI models with no compromises," wrote venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in a post on X over the weekend. "Incredible timing given current events."

Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, called the recent developments "a pretty good wake-up call," and Jefferies strategist Christopher Wood wrote in a report to clients, citing industry sources, that GLM 5.2 "is almost equal to Anthropic as a competitor for the corporate market and is just one quarter of the cost in terms of cost per token."

Even former Trump crypto and AI czar David Sacks, who's been a vocal critic of Anthropic's approach to AI safety, wrote a cryptic post on X above a screenshot of a Wall Street Journal headline stating that China has matched Anthropic in cybersecurity.

"A year ago, President Trump declared that America was in a global AI race and that the way to win it was to be pro-innovation, pro-infrastructure, pro-energy, and pro-export," Sacks wrote. "President Trump was exactly right; we deviate from that strategy at our peril."

Representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI and the White House didn't respond to requests for comment.

The Chinese conundrum lands just as much of corporate America is moving from an era of so-called tokenmaxxing, or allowing developers to spend on AI without restraint, to a focus on efficiency and return on investment. That also plays into China's hands.

Earlier this month, Flo Crivello, CEO of AI startup Lindy, switched his company off Anthropic's Claude models and moved 100% of its traffic to DeepSeek, a Chinese company that makes cheaper, open-weight alternatives. 

"We did it, and you could see that cost curve go down, like, crash to the ground," Crivello told CNBC for a story published last week.

Chinese AI developers are reaching U.S. users with ease because of how simple it is for a company to download open-weight models and run them on their own servers without relying on a third-party cloud.

"With the open-weight models, it's kind of the Wild West," said Travis Lanham, co-founder of AI security startup Armadin, which is experimenting with GLM 5.2 and another Chinese model, Kimi K2.7 from Moonshoot AI.

Lanham said the models are showing improved capabilities for cybersecurity use cases like analyzing reconnaissance data and creating customer exploit code.

Whether U.S. authorities will allow that to continue is an emerging question in policy circles due to how the two largest economies handle each other's sensitive hardware. For years, the U.S. government has gone to great lengths to keep cutting-edge AI innovation out of China's hands through U.S. export controls on AI chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. The U.S. also banned American companies from using Huawei equipment because of national security fears.

Last year, the U.S. cleared Nvidia's H200 chip — the same model used by U.S. companies — for export to the China region. But Nvidia said earlier this year that it had yet to generate any revenue from the chips and that it didn't know whether China would allow imports of its products.

As for GLM 5.2, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote in a post on X that the model would probably reach Fable levels by the first quarter, responding to a question from a user asking when that milestone would be reached.

Zhipu founder Jie Tang, in a reply to Musk, wrote, "won't take that long."

It's not just niche brands turning to Chinese models. Major companies like Shopify and Airbnb have touted the benefits of Alibaba's Qwen 3 for scaling AI features. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on X last week that his company is utilizing open-weight models such as GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7, allowing it to cut nearly half its AI spending despite greater token use.

Cybersecurity is the primary concern for many industry experts. Some open-weight models can already automate many stages of a cyberattack, and Hed Kovetz, CEO of industry startup Silverfort, worries they're only months away from running an entire operation.

"If the U.S. government does not let the industry take advantage of this opportunity to get ready, then when the Chinese models reach a similar level, no one will be prepared," he said.

— CNBC's Deirdre Bosa and Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.

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