The US government should ban government agencies and contractors from using Chinese AI models, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., argued in a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent this week.
“Backdoors may be embedded into open weight Chinese models, and auditing produces limited assurances. American companies, particularly those that do business with the US government, should never jeopardize our security for higher profits,” Cotton wrote in the letter, which was sent Wednesday and shared first with Semafor.
The Republican senator raised broad concerns with the rising popularity of Chinese open-source AI models in the US, and urged Commerce to enact strict export controls on advanced compute and chipmaking equipment.
He also urged the Trump administration to “actively nurture an open AI ecosystem in the US to rival” China’s, given that leading US models are mostly closed.
Commerce didn’t return a request for comment on the letter.