Regulation AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-18

A crypto venture 38 percent owned by the Trump family is selling access to the Chinese AI models Washington is trying to shut out

Reuters reported on 17 August that World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture backed by Donald Trump, is working with WorldClaw, a Hong Kong-based platform that resells access to AI models. Of the 90 models WorldClaw lists, 43 come from Chinese companies including Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai, DeepSeek and Moonshot — several of which face US national security or intellectual property scrutiny — alongside models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Users can pay with World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin, which is backed one-to-one by short-term US Treasuries and dollar deposits; World Liberty collects a share of the interest those reserves earn, and the Trump family owns 38 percent of World Liberty. Daniel Remler, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who previously advised the State Department, warned that using Chinese models this way could expose users to Chinese government monitoring, censored outputs and code injected to hijack AI agents.

Why it mattersThis is the same administration that is pressing 35 countries to choose between an American and a Chinese AI bloc. A business the president's family profits from is quietly selling the other side's models to Americans, and takes a cut every time someone pays for them. Whatever the security argument is worth, it is now being made by a government whose first family has money on both ends of the transaction — and export rules only work if they apply to the people writing them.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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A crypto venture 38 percent owned by the Trump family is selling access to the Chinese AI models Washington is trying to shut out

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