Zuckerberg: ‘Blocking Chinese AI won’t help the United States’
The founder of Meta has called on the United States not to ban Chinese artificial intelligence models, arguing that technological leadership is achieved through greater innovation and competition, not through bans
Mark Zuckerberg has taken a stand in the global race for artificial intelligence and urged Washington not to close the door on models developed in China. In an interview with the Financial Times, the founder and CEO of Meta argued that banning access to Chinese AI systems would not be an effective strategy for maintaining US technological leadership, and warned of the risk that excessive regulation could end up reinforcing the dominance of large US research laboratories by limiting domestic competition.
The statements come at a time when high tension between the United States and China over artificial intelligence. A heated debate is currently underway in Washington on how to regulate a technology now considered crucial to national security and economic competitiveness, whilst the Trump administration is considering new measures against Chinese companies in the sector.
At the centre of the discussions is Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based start-up which, in recent weeks, has unveiled the Kimi K3 model – a model that several observers believe is capable of competing with the systems developed by OpenAI and Anthropic. According to senior US officials, Moonshot is said to have trained its model using a technique known as ‘distillation’, which allows the capabilities of an existing model to be transferred to a new one and which, according to Washington, was used in breach of US companies’ intellectual property rights. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has stated that sanctions against the Chinese laboratories remain an option should cases of intellectual property theft be confirmed.
Zuckerberg, however, believes that the US response should not be to ban Chinese models. According to Meta’s CEO, the United States should instead focus on identifying the ‘bottlenecks’ that are slowing down domestic innovation, thereby strengthening the ability of its own companies to compete with Beijing in a sector set to shape the economic and geopolitical balance of power in the coming years.
The remarks by Meta’s founder also reflect the different strategy pursued by his company compared with its main competitors. Zuckerberg reiterated his belief that artificial intelligence should be as accessible as possible and reaffirmed the ‘open’ development model, arguing that users should be able to customise and run the systems directly on their own hardware. This approach contrasts with that of OpenAI and Anthropic, which is based on proprietary, closed models, and which, according to Zuckerberg, reduces the risk of technological power becoming concentrated in the hands of a few major players.
