US AI leaders turn to Chinese open-weight models, challenging closed-source safety claims

More American titans of Artificial Intelligence are describing Chinese open-weight models as better for AI safety and security than closed-source models, challenging the long-standing claim by US closed-source AI model developers such as Anthropic that open-source models present a threat to society.“From what I’m seeing, I think open-weight models seem safer to me than closed-weight models,” AI pioneer Andrew Ng, the former head of Google Brain and former chief scientist at Baidu, said at the Agentic AI Summit in Berkeley, California, on Saturday.Ng said that he and a colleague turned to use two Chinese models – Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 – to conduct a security review of their new open-source AI agent tool called OpenWorker, released last month, after leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic refused to help with the task.