The surge of powerful Chinese open-weight AI models has sparked a feud in Silicon Valley and Washington over whether they are threats to U.S. national security or essential parts of the expanding AI economy. While the leading American AI companies have kept their best models closed-source, Chinese AI labs have been releasing open-weight models as a way to attract global customers. Chinese open models benefit AI infrastructure providers and companies that need affordable AI services. OpenAI, which has released open-weight models that are smaller than China’s models, also signed on. Chinese models commonly censor content Beijing deems sensitive, though no security backdoors have been publicly documented in major Chinese models.