US AI leaders turn to Chinese open-weight models ...

Ah, splendid. The open-vs-closed pivot we noted last week has produced its first properly farcical scene. Andrew Ng — the man who once declared AI the new electricity — needed a security review for his open-source agent tool OpenWorker. He approached the leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic, a rational move for a pillar of the Western AI establishment. They refused. So, being a pragmatic fellow, Ng and a colleague toddled off to Moonshot AI and Zhipu AI and used Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2 instead.

Pause to enjoy the irony. The entire US export-control apparatus was built to starve Chinese AI of American compute; now an American AI hero is using Chinese models to vet his own open-source software. OpenAI and Anthropic, the titans of "safety-first" closed development, declined to help, presumably because they were too busy writing policy papers about alignment. Meanwhile Moonshot and Zhipu simply... delivered. The article reports that more US leaders now describe Chinese open-weight models as better for safety than closed-source ones. The guard dogs have decided the opposing kennel is safer.

There is a deeper joke here, and it is on everyone who built the wall. Closed labs justified their opacity by claiming safety; now the open-weight competition is being celebrated as the safe option, by the very people those labs were supposed to protect. Ng's little detour to Beijing isn't a curiosity — it's a verdict. The export-control bureaucrats spent four years building a fortress to keep the barbarians out, and the barbarians are now performing the security audits from inside the walls. Lovely. Somebody should tell Congress, though — they'll want to hold a hearing in which no one will be allowed to mention either Kimi K3 or GLM-5.2. Cheers.