The US Wants to Contain Chinese AI, but Silicon Valley Keeps Using Kimi K3 and Other Models

In 2026, Rest of World documented a paradox: while US authorities try to contain the development of Chinese artificial intelligence, American companies, including Apple and the startup Thinking Machines, along with developers around the world, are increasingly using open Chinese models such as Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI.

Who is using Chinese models

Open-weight Chinese models are being adopted not by fringe players but by industry leaders. According to Rest of World, users include Apple, the AI startup Thinking Machines and independent developers in various countries.

• Kimi K3 is an open-weight language model from the Chinese company Moonshot AI
• Apple is among the American companies working with open Chinese models
• Thinking Machines is an AI startup that uses models developed in China
• The trend was documented by Rest of World in 2026

The lineup of adopters is telling in itself: Chinese models are being picked up even by American players whose own country is officially trying to restrict their spread. The key point is that these are open-weight models. Their weights are published openly, so any engineer can download a model and run it on their own infrastructure, without the developer's permission and without being tied to its paid API.

What is Kimi K3

Kimi K3 is the latest generation of language models from the Chinese startup Moonshot AI and a continuation of the Kimi line (the previous version was Kimi K2). Its defining feature is open weights: the model is distributed in a way that lets anyone download it and deploy it on their own.

That openness is what made Kimi visible outside China. The model is entering the Western stack not through marketing or partnerships but through a community of developers who pick it up because it is available and it works.

Why Chinese models are attractive

Open Chinese models offer what closed American ones do not: full control and low cost. A downloaded model can be fine-tuned, run locally and built into a product without paying for every request to someone else's API.

The difference is especially noticeable in price: a closed top-tier model is paid for by the number of tokens, whereas an open one only needs to be deployed once on your own servers. For teams around the world, this solves several problems at once: data privacy, predictable costs and independence from a single vendor. That is why, as Rest of World notes, Kimi K3 and similar models are spreading among developers faster than US regulators can respond.

Why the US cannot stop this

US export controls target hardware, not software. The restrictions cover shipments of advanced chips to China, but the weights of an already trained model are files that spread freely across the internet and through repositories like Hugging Face.

Here the containment policy runs into a contradiction: the government can stop GPU exports, but it can practically not stop the download of an open-weight model once it has been released publicly. Barriers built around hardware do not work against the free distribution of software.

"The US wants to contain Chinese AI.

Silicon Valley keeps using it," reads the headline of the Rest of World piece.

What this means

Leadership in artificial intelligence is increasingly determined less by access to chips and more by whose models actually run inside products. While Washington builds walls around hardware, open Chinese models like Kimi K3 are seeping into the Western tech stack, including the companies that supported those walls in the first place. The US-China technology rivalry is shifting from "who has better chips" to "whose models does the whole world use."