'Vital national security': Jim Cramer says US firms 'must NOT' use Chinese AI to save a buck — but Microsoft and Airbnb already are

Following news that Microsoft, one of the luminaries meant to be at the forefront of our own computing buildout, is allegedly experimenting with incorporating a new Chinese large language model into its own platforms, Cramer took to X to speak out against the move.

“We must NOT let our companies use these Chinese models to save a few bucks,” Cramer wrote to his 2.4 million followers on July 21. “OpenAI and Anthropic are correct. This is vital national security (…) I respect the Chinese people greatly but these companies are run by the [People’s Liberation Army] for heaven’s sake.”

It is speculated that Beijing-headquartered Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, the LLM that Microsoft is toying with, could cost 60% less than using the equivalent software from American names like OpenAI or Anthropic.

Thousands have since responded to Cramer’s post, with stances divided, ranging from the belief that China is equally welcome to participate in the U.S.’s free market to Chinese ventures presenting an incursion in “an economic war” where “AI is the latest frontier” and sabotage is the goal.

A few have noted that the open source nature of the internationally-built tech makes it “anyone’s” to build on and utilize, claiming they have “no ongoing connection to China.”

The feared trade-offs of cost savings

Executives from OpenAI, however, warn of “full AI communism” where systems serve as a state-provided public good rather than a market product, leaving the question of how further AI expansion would be funded, and also how the industry would ever earn back the monumental capital expenditure that is being funnelled in.

There are also risks presented when potentially catastrophic machine capabilities — such as being able to find and weaponize critical gaps in cybersecurity — are made widely available through open source code.

“My worries here are geopolitical (...) The fact that the CCP could reach into the US business network and suppress criticism, that’s an authoritarian state, and a high-tech authoritarian state. When I see how that combines with AI, you really get a dystopia here, like 1984 or worse,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Bloomberg a few weeks back.

“My focus is on trying to prevent that, and I think we have an opportunity to prevent that. I think we have an opportunity for AI to be a pro-democracy technology that makes people freer (…) or it could go the other way.” He added that the direction is entirely dependent on the actions of tech enterprises, governments — really “all of us.”

Microsoft isn’t alone in considering lower-cost options outside of the US

Microsoft isn’t the only U.S. brand dabbling in Chinese code lately, either. Airbnb and Anysphere were both mentioned in an April 2026 missive from the The U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party announcing an investigation into “the national security and cybersecurity risks posed by the growing adoption of Chinese-developed artificial intelligence models.”

In the release, leaders wrote that the two tech firms’ use of said models serve to “undercut U.S. leadership, weaken trusted American alternatives, and embed CCP-aligned technology across the software supply chains our economy and national security depend on,” along with presenting tremendous data exposure threats.