“I don’t think it’s as simple as: is the United States or China in mind?” In an interview with CNBC, Sam Altman, the head of Openai, alert about China’s progress in artificial intelligence. Notably points out that the United States underestimates the capacities of the country of Asia in this area.
The United States has long thought about the head in AI’s career. But the place of this leader was interrogated in January 2025 with the surprising launch of Deepseek, a Chinese model, competitor of American giants such as Chatgpt. He was particularly feared for his computer power, for less consumption of resources.
The export of controlled and ineffective chip?
Long before Depseek, in 2022, Joe Biden had established the Chips Law, a text that limited the export of US electronic fleas to China. Donald Trump First Porsui this plan, prohibiting the sale of Chinese chips, before changing their minds, preferring controlled export.
Sam Altman doubts this strategy to hinder Chinese innovation. The restrictions established by the US government may not be sufficient according to the OpenAI head, they encourage China to build their internal electronic components. It is significantly said that Huawei could meet the demand for chips in the country.
“You can control the exports of a product, but it may not be the right product … people could build factories or find other derivation solutions. (…) I would like there to be a simple solution, but my instinct tells me it is difficult,” explains Sam Altman to CNBC.
More open models
The OpenAI chief fears above all that deep Speek becomes a privileged model for research. The reason? China is an “open source” model, that is, a model whose computer code and training data are accessible to all. This type of transparent can be modified by anyone. This flexibility can, in particular, interest research and developers.
That is why Openai, in early August, launched two models in “open weight”, that is, the code is not entirely accessible, but AI can be modified and configured according to the user’s wishes. Since 2022, Chatgpt versions have been “closed code”, this means that the code was inaccessible.
“It was clear that if we did not (the transition to the open weight”, note of the editor), the world would be built mainly in Chinese “open source” models. This certainly influenced our decision. It was not the only factor, but played an important role, “Sam Altman said in his interview.
Two visions of AI
Today, in AI, two different visions between the United States and China oppose. To maintain the place of their leader, Americans encourage the unbridled development of AI. Donald Trump said he wanted to “identify, review or repeal the regulations, rules, memoranda, administrative orders and agreements between institutions that unnecessarily hinder the development or deployment of AI.”
However, this urgency goes against the recommendations of IA sponsors, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. The latter are in favor of a much more controlled development.
For its part, China shows an equally marked interest in AI investigation. The World Conference of AI (World Conference on AI) of Shanghai was organized at the end of July 2025. The Chinese prime minister was able to express himself on the occasion of this event and announced that he wanted to establish international supervision around AI.
Another similar area in which China radiates is robotics. Beijing organized the World Humanoid Robotics Games between August 15 and 17. 16 countries have participated, but it was the Chinese engineers who largely dominated the competition.
Source: BFM TV
