Mark Zuckerberg says banning Chinese AI isn't 'an effective solution' — and right now nobody has to tell you when an app you use is running one

Zuckerberg, for one, has made his position clear: Blocking access to these competitive programs would not be “an effective solution” and would instead stifle innovation at home.

After speaking with the Financial Times, the Meta CEO also published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal criticizing excessive government oversight and arguing that the future of superintelligence, which he called “the most profound technological advance we will see in our lifetimes,” should be accessible to everyone.

“We believe that the values that got us to this point — liberty, open inquiry, free enterprise and equal opportunity — are also the values to build a positive future,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg criticized the idea of concentrated, centralized control over AI development, though he said some form of peer review is necessary to keep the industry in check.

He also argued that giving everyone “full access to powerful systems” would ultimately be “the best way to protect safety and security over time,” pushing back against claims from government officials and industry leaders that Chinese AI models pose an inherent security threat.

Chinese AI is a matter of ‘vital national security’

The Office of Science and Technology has been on high alert after receiving evidence that Chinese companies such as Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have been training their models using outputs from U.S. large language models instead of building them from scratch. The practice has raised concerns about intellectual property theft, data access and national.

“Foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems,” the office wrote in an April memo. “These coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation.”

Presidential science advisor Michael Kratsios added that while “legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models plays a vital role in this open innovation ecosystem … large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable.”

The Chinese government, meanwhile, has accused the US of engaging in “AI hegemonism” and has vowed to take any “necessary measures” to protect its interests.

At the same time, countless apps use Chinese AI without disclosing it to users. DeepSeek, for example, openly admits that it stores user information “in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”