In the annals of dumb mistakes, integrating your customers’ data with the tech of known foreign-enemy practitioners of surveillance and theft must rank near the top. Why is this exposure legal?
It is at least being formally remonstrated against and investigated. The chairmen of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Committee on Homeland Security have announced “a joint investigation into the national security and cybersecurity risks posed by the growing adoption of Chinese-developed artificial intelligence models, including…systems developed by Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax” (Select Committee on the CCP, April 29, 2006).
Cheap but dangerous
John Moolenaar, chairman of the Select Committee on the CCP, says: “Airbnb and Anysphere’s decisions to build their products on Chinese Communist AI models threaten critical infrastructure Americans use every day. The AI models these companies use are trained by China’s censorship regime and introduce hidden vulnerabilities that put Americans’ data and businesses at risk. Chinese AI companies are beholden to Chinese law and could turn over data they collect from Airbnb and Anysphere to the Chinese government if they are asked to do so.”
Airbnb is a platform that connects people who need a place to stay with people willing to let them stay in their homes.
Anysphere is an artificial intelligence firm that produces Cursor, an AI-assisted code editor.
Andrew Garbarino, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, says that by distilling AI models (in a way that constitutes stealing) produced by U.S. firms and rapidly distributing models developed in the People’s Republic of China throughout the globe, “China is working 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. American companies cannot afford to treat Chinese AI as a cheap and convenient tool when the consequences may include exposed data, compromised systems, and long-term dependence on adversary-controlled technology.”
The investigation comes amid growing concern that China-based AI companies are using unauthorized model distillation and other illicit techniques to extract capabilities from leading American frontier models, then repackaging those capabilities into lower-cost models without the same safeguards included in the original American models, which are then marketed or made available to U.S. companies, developers, and consumers. While model distillation can be a legitimate AI development technique, distillation conducted through fraudulent accounts, proxy networks, evasion of access restrictions, or violations of U.S. companies’ terms of service raises serious concerns about model provenance, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and supply-chain risk.
As an initial step in the probe, the Chairmen sent letters to Anysphere and Airbnb, raising concerns about the companies’ use of or exposure to these risks through Chinese-developed AI.
The letters
From the letter to Anysphere: “On March 19, 2026, Anysphere, Inc., through its Cursor product, released a new model called Composer 2 and marketed it as offering ‘frontier-level coding intelligence,’ with benchmark results that reportedly exceeded those of leading American models at roughly one tenth the inference cost. Anysphere…did not identify the underlying base model at launch. Within hours, an independent developer examining Cursor’s application programming interface (API) traffic discovered an internal model identifier indicating that Composer 2 was built on Kimi K2.5, an open-weight model released in January 2026 by Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based company backed by Alibaba Group…. Moonshot AI one of the three PRC-based laboratories publicly implicated in the industrial-scale distillation campaigns described above.”
From the letter to Airbnb: “The Committees are examining these issues in connection with Airbnb’s reported use of Alibaba’s Qwen large language model in its customer service operations. You recently stated publicly that Airbnb is relying on Qwen over American alternatives because it is ‘fast and cheap.’ The Committees have serious concerns about the national security and data-security implications of that approach for Airbnb’s American customers and for the integrity of its systems.”
