Sam Altman has declared that the United States is making a mistake in how it approaches China’s artificial intelligence. The OpenAI CEO told a group of journalists in San Francisco that Donald Trump’s latest ban on advanced chips won’t stop Beijing from advancing in AI.
According to CNBC, Sam met with reporters at the Presidio hotel over Mediterranean food, where he explained how serious the situation really is. “I worry about China,” he said.
He warned that this isn’t a race where one side simply pulls ahead and wins. “There’s inference capacity, where China can probably build faster,” Altman explained. “There’s research, there’s product; the entire thing has many layers.”
He argued that the U.S. is focusing on just one part — blocking chip exports — while China is working on the full stack. And despite tighter controls, Sam doubts these efforts are actually working. When asked if fewer GPUs going to China was a win, he responded: “My instinct is that it’s not working.”
Trump Blocks Chips, but Altman Says the Policy Is Failing
Trump, now back in the White House, approved a full ban on exporting high-end chips to China in April 2025. This went further than earlier rules under President Joe Biden, which had already restricted China’s access to advanced AI hardware.
Trump’s new policy even prohibited the sale of modified chips that had been designed to comply with Biden’s earlier rules. But just last week, Washington tweaked the rules again.
Under the new arrangement, Nvidia and AMD can once again sell certain “China-safe” chips — but they must hand over 15% of the revenue from those sales to the U.S. government. Altman didn’t comment directly on this deal, but he made it clear that controlling AI progress through policy alone isn’t realistic.
“You can control exports, but maybe that’s not the right thing… people may just build factories or find other solutions,” he said. “I’d love a simple solution. But my instinct says: this is hard.”
He emphasized that it’s not just about chips. Chinese companies are already collaborating with local suppliers such as Huawei. U.S. controls haven’t stopped them — if anything, they’ve accelerated their efforts. While America remains dependent on Nvidia and AMD, Chinese labs are creating homegrown alternatives.
China’s AI Push Forces OpenAI to Release New Models
Altman added that China’s rapid progress has also forced OpenAI to release new models of its own. For years, the company resisted publishing full models, keeping everything locked behind APIs. But as China releases more open tools such as DeepSeek, OpenAI is shifting course.
“It became clear that if we didn’t do it, the world would lean heavily toward Chinese open-source models,” Sam explained. “That was certainly a factor in our decision. Not the only one, but a major one.”
OpenAI has just released two new models: gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. These are the company’s first open-weight models since GPT-2 in 2019. The new models aren’t fully open source — the training data and source code remain closed — but the weights are now public.
This means developers can download and run them, even offline. Altman said the goal was to support developers in building locally-run coding agents.
Sam admitted that these models won’t impress everyone. Some developers argue they lack key features. He didn’t dispute that, saying his team built them for one reason only: and if global demand shifts, they will adapt. “If the world’s demand changes,” he said, “you can pivot to something else.”
At the moment, OpenAI is the only major U.S. company moving in this direction. Meta previously took a similar path with its LLaMA models, but Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that may change. That leaves OpenAI at the forefront — at least for now — as Chinese labs continue releasing flexible tools available to anyone.
Altman has previously admitted that locking down models put OpenAI “on the wrong side of history.” This new move looks like an attempt to correct that — but also a way to keep developers inside OpenAI’s ecosystem, instead of losing them to Chinese labs offering greater freedom.
#AI ,
#SamAltman ,
#ArtificialInteligence ,
#TRUMP ,
#china Stay one step ahead – follow our profile and stay informed about everything important in the world of cryptocurrencies!
Notice:
,,The information and views presented in this article are intended solely for educational purposes and should not be taken as investment advice in any situation. The content of these pages should not be regarded as financial, investment, or any other form of advice. We caution that investing in cryptocurrencies can be risky and may lead to financial losses.“