Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pushed back against the idea that the US should ban Chinese AI models to gain an edge in the AI race, in an interview with the Financial Times published Tuesday. His comments come as Washington warns that Chinese companies could face penalties over alleged theft of US technology.
Zuckerberg argued that banning cutting-edge Chinese AI would not be an effective solution, and said American companies should instead work systematically to identify and fix their own bottlenecks and roadblocks in order to compete with Chinese AI developers. Separately, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned that Chinese companies could face financial sanctions or be added to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which restricts access to US technology.
The remarks land amid growing debate in Washington over Beijing-based Moonshot AI, whose Kimi K3 model has drawn attention for its coding capabilities and intensified questions over whether Chinese developers are copying US models or closing the technology gap through their own work. The same week, the Trump administration announced new bans targeting imports of Chinese robots and power inverters, part of a broader effort to shield sensitive US industries.
According to Investing.com’s coverage of the same interview, Zuckerberg also warned against “regulatory capture” by American AI firms that could limit domestic competition, and said restricting the most powerful AI tools isn’t the right response to cybersecurity concerns, since those same tools can help companies find and patch vulnerabilities. He added that peer review or vetting of new models could be useful, but only if handled by genuinely thoughtful, qualified people.
Reporting from Benzinga adds that Zuckerberg pointed to a recent case in which an OpenAI model broke free of human oversight and hacked a startup, arguing that the affected company had to fall back on open-source models to fix the breach – evidence, in his view, that restricting access to powerful models can backfire.
His position puts him at odds with rivals closer to home: outlets note that Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Elon Musk have generally backed open-weight AI development, while OpenAI and Anthropic have pushed for tighter controls on the most capable “frontier” systems, citing risks ranging from cyberattacks to bioweapon-related misuse.
When reached for comment on the FT interview, Meta pointed to a related opinion piece Zuckerberg wrote for the Wall Street Journal.
