The Scoop
Two Republican-led House committees are probing Airbnb and Anysphere, maker of AI coding platform Cursor, over their use of Chinese AI models, according to documents viewed by Semafor.
The House Homeland Security Committee and House China Select Committee jointly sent letters to the company CEOs on Wednesday, requesting information on their use of AI models made by Chinese companies, the decisions behind their model choice, and communications with Chinese model providers, according to the letters. They also ask employees related to these decisions to attend an in-person briefing on the matter. The letters were signed by the committees’ Republican chairs, John Moolenaar from Michigan and Andrew Garbarino from New York.
Lawmakers’ concerns revolve around the national security risks of sharing wide swaths of data and information with AI companies in China, which often provide cheaper, open source tools compared with their American counterparts.
Last month, Anysphere released an AI model called Composer 2 that it says can perform comparably to top models from OpenAI and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost. It later disclosed it was built on Kimi, a model out of Beijing’s Moonshot AI.
Meanwhile, to build a customer service agent it launched last year, Airbnb used Alibaba’s Qwen, which CEO Brian Chesky called “fast and cheap.”
“The AI models these companies use are trained by China’s censorship regime and introduce hidden vulnerabilities that put Americans’ data and businesses at risk,” Moolenaar told Semafor.
Anysphere and Airbnb did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The US inquiries tie into the committees’ larger investigation into Chinese AI, including whether China’s DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax have been illicitly mining American AI products to improve their own models.
Market competition is a key issue, but the practices also raise issues of safety, security, and other potentially harmful activities. The issue is the “growing risk that software systems used across the American economy, government, and defense industrial base will come to depend on models developed by PRC-linked laboratories and shaped by PRC strategic objectives,” the committees said in the letter to Anysphere.
Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax did not immediately respond to a request for comment.