Meta AI head Alexandr Wang has called on American startups to treat serving the US government as a fundamental principle rather than a commercial convenience. Reacting to a post shared by Aakash Sabharwal, VP of engineering at Scale AI, Wang said: “Serving the US government should not be a commercial convenience, it must be a bedrock principle for startups.” Sabharwal, responding to a Forbes report on Chinese companies sourcing training data from Silicon Valley firms, warned that data companies working with the U.S. government should not also serve Chinese AI labs. “American companies should not be selling data to Chinese AI labs. @scale_AI doesn’t do this work, and we have turned down revenue because of it. The companies that do are undermining American AI leadership and risking national security,” he wrote.
Alexandr Wang’s Chinese companies sourcing training data from Silicon Valley firms
Wang raised concerns after the report by Forbes revealed that Chinese companies are sourcing data from Silicon Valley firms. According to the report, sales teams from Silicon Valley’s data-labeling startups encountered eager buyers from China’s AI industry at this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul, with Tencent among the firms circulating detailed requests for training data covering finance, cybersecurity and self-improving AI systems.The investigation found that the same American vendors serving OpenAI, Anthropic, and in some cases the U.S. government, including firms such as Surge AI, Mercor, AfterQuery and Turing, have also supplied Chinese buyers such as Tencent, Ant Group, Alibaba and ByteDance. Citing data-labeling entrepreneurs with visibility into the market, Forbes estimated that the top six Chinese AI labs collectively spend around $500 million a year with American data-labeling companies. The report noted that while the U.S. has restricted China’s access to advanced AI chips, it has not placed similar restrictions on the training data and human expertise that shape how AI models learn to perform complex tasks.
AI Czar David Sacks says China’s Kimi K3 model is ‘concerning’ for America
Meanwhile, in related news, AI Czar David Sacks shared his views on China’s new Kimi K3 artificial intelligence (AI) model, calling its performance “concerning” for American technological dominance. Sacks warned that heavy domestic regulation is crippling US innovation just as overseas rivals catch up, drawing an immediate agreement from billionaire Elon Musk. Sacks comments came soon after Beijing promoted itself as an alternative to American supremacy in AI.“This is concerning. For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken #1 on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks,” Sacks said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Beijing-backed startup Moonshot AI officially open-sourced a massive 2.8 trillion-parameter system that is actively dethroning top American AI models on global coding benchmarks.“Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models,” Sacks added, purportedly pointing to US government’s decision to restrict Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to non-Americans.“This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI — while addressing risks in a targeted way — or we’ll watch our lead evaporate,” he added.