Sam Altman has said that the U.S. is making a mistake in the AI game against China. The OpenAI CEO stated that the latest ban by President Donald Trump on exporting advanced chips will not stop China from advancing in artificial intelligence.

According to CNBC, Sam met with some reporters in San Francisco and said the situation is really bad. "I'm worried about China," he said.

He warned that this is not a race where one side pulls ahead and wins. "There is a reasoning capability, where China could build faster," Sam said. "There is research, there are products; many layers to the issue."

He explained that the U.S. is focusing on one part, blocking chip exports, while China is working on the entire system. And despite many controls, Sam does not think anything is really helping. "My instinct is that it is ineffective," he said when asked if fewer GPUs to China is a victory.

Trump blocks chips, but Sam says that policy is failing.

Trump, now back in the White House, signed a ban on exporting advanced chips to China in April 2025. This goes further than previous regulations from President Joe Biden, who added restrictions to slow China's access to advanced artificial intelligence hardware.

Trump's new policy halts even modified chips, those designed to circumvent Biden's regulations, from being exported. But just a week ago, Washington changed the rules again.

Under a new agreement, Nvidia and AMD can now resell some "China-safe" chips. But they must pay 15% of the revenue from those sales to the U.S. government. Sam did not directly comment on that agreement, but he clarified that managing AI progress through policy alone is unrealistic.

"You can control the export of one thing, but it may not be the right thing... perhaps people will build factories or find another way," he said. "I am very eager for an easy solution," he added. "But my instinct is: It's hard."

He clarified that this is not just about chips. Chinese companies have collaborated with their own suppliers like Huawei. The controls from Washington do not deter China. If anything, they have caused Chinese companies to move faster. While the U.S. still relies on Nvidia and AMD, Chinese labs are building alternatives.

China's progress pushes OpenAI to release new models.

Sam said China's progress in artificial intelligence is also driving OpenAI to expand its own models. For many years, the company refused to release full models, opting to lock everything behind application programming interfaces (APIs). But now, as China is releasing many open-source tools like DeepSeek, OpenAI is changing its course.

"Clearly, if we don't do it, the world will mainly rely on China's open-source models," Sam said. "That is a factor in our decision, for sure. It's not the only factor, but it's huge."

OpenAI has just released two new models: gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. These are their first open-weight models since GPT-2 was launched in 2019. The new models are not entirely open source, training data and source code are still locked, but the weights are now public.

That means developers can download and run them, even when not connected to the internet. The goal, Sam said, is to support those building local programming systems.

Sam acknowledged that these models do not amaze anyone. Some developers feel they lack important features. He did not argue. The team built them with a single goal in mind, he said, and if demand changes, they will adjust. "If that kind of demand changes in the world," he said, "you can shift it to another one."

Currently, OpenAI is the only large company in the U.S. pursuing this path. Meta previously released open source with its Llama models, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said they might stop. This puts OpenAI in the lead, at least for the future, as Chinese labs continue to release flexible tools that anyone can use.

Sam has previously said that locking models has put OpenAI "on the wrong side of history." This new decision seems to be an effort to correct that. But it is also a way to keep developers inside OpenAI instead of letting them move to Chinese labs that offer more freedom.

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