Washington Post probe: US AI industry leans heavily on Chinese models and parts
A Washington Post investigation reported that the US AI industry is deeply intertwined with Chinese supply chains at the model, hardware and component levels, with US companies including DoorDash and Airbnb using Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and other Chinese open-weight models for everyday tasks because they cost far less than closed models from Anthropic and OpenAI; when the Trump administration weighed a national-security ban on Chinese AI in July, a coalition of nearly 300 US companies publicly objected, the report said. It said Congress began examining US firms' use of Chinese AI models in April, and that the FBI, NSA and a DHS cyber agency issued a joint advisory last month alleging Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Zhipu trained on US models without authorization and breached US companies' terms of service — allegations attributed to US agencies. The report also cited Epoch AI in putting six leading Chinese AI firms' disclosed annual revenue at roughly 10% of Anthropic and OpenAI combined, and a Morgan Stanley estimate that making Tesla's Optimus 2 with Chinese suppliers costs about $46,000 in materials versus nearly three times that, $132,000, without them.
It frames US-China AI rivalry through supply chains, where mutual dependence in models, robot parts and data-center equipment gives unilateral decoupling a measurable price.