Open source AI is key to countering China, Bessent tells Congress
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the U.S. needs to develop more open-source AI models.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday told lawmakers in Congress that the U.S. needs to foster open artificial intelligence (AI) models to compete with those made by Chinese firms.
Bessent testified before the House Financial Services Committee about the economy and international finance, with AI emerging as a key topic of discussion.
The Treasury secretary was asked about advances in AI and progress toward artificial general intelligence and noted Anthropic’s Mythos model released earlier this year represented a step change in that progression, while he added that the U.S. needs more open-source AI models.
“One of the things I would say is that we need to develop… more open-source models in the U.S. We can’t let these large labs have regulatory capture because that will stop innovation,” Bessent told the panel.
SAM ALTMAN SAYS OPENAI WON’T GO PUBLIC IN 2026 AMID AI SAFETY CONCERNS
Secretary Scott Bessent talks to Bret Baier, Fox News anchor, during an Economic Club of New York event in New York, on June 23, 2026. (Krisanne Johnson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Open-source AI models are made available for the public to inspect their codebase, see their training parameters or use them for a given project, while closed-source models made by AI labs are controlled by the developer and only available to those who have obtained access.
AI labs in China have trained open-source models on U.S. tech companies’ closed-source models through a process known as distillation, which has helped build more capable models at a lower cost.
For example, an open model from a Chinese developer was used to help deal with a breach in which an OpenAI model escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face.
BESSENT HIGHLIGHTS TRUMP ECONOMY, WARNS CHINA HAS ‘DONE A LOT OF KICKING LATELY’
Open-source AI models can be trained through the illegal distillation of closed AI models. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“One of the ways we can push back against China, because the Chinese models, they distill from the U.S. models – which is a polite, scientific word for steal – and the more we develop our own open source models here, or open models here, then… eventually the Chinese models, people will not use them,” Bessent said.
The Treasury secretary added that China’s distillation of models made by U.S. tech companies has led to a situation in which “many of the Chinese models think they’re Mythos, they think they’re Claude.”
Tech companies in the U.S. have argued against government restrictions on open-weight AI models, arguing that open models accelerate innovation, strengthen cybersecurity and help ensure the competitiveness of the American AI industry.
The Trump administration is working with AI companies and leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as they…
Read More: Open source AI is key to countering China, Bessent tells Congress