House investigating Airbnb over Chinese AI models
House Republicans have launched an investigation into U.S. companies’ use of Chinese-developed artificial intelligence , starting with a probe into Airbnb and Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor.
In letters sent Thursday to the companies, the Republican chairs of the House Committee of Homeland Security and House Select Committee on China said their joint investigation is looking into the growing national security risks posed by Chinese AI models.
In their letter to Anysphere, Reps. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) and John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) raised concerns about Cursor’s new model, Composer 2, after an independent developer discovered the model was built on systems from Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based firm backed by Alibaba Group.
Moonshot AI, according to the lawmakers, was one of three China-based firms that conducted “coordinated campaigns to extract advanced capabilities” from American AI systems. The other firms of concern were DeepSeek and MiniMax, the letter states.
“When capabilities are stripped out through distillation and repackaged without equivalent
safeguards, the resulting models may become available to hostile state actors, terrorist
organizations, and criminal enterprises,” the lawmakers wrote.
Distillation occurs when the outputs of a stronger model are used to train less capable models.
“Alarmingly, this conduct is part of a broader PRC campaign to accelerate its AI
capabilities through the exploitation of American innovation, including through espionage,
intellectual property theft, and other unlawful or deceptive means,” they continued.
Garbarino and Moolenaar further asked Airbnb about its reported use of Alibaba’s Qwen large language models in its customer service models. They pointed to comments by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who said last year that the company is “relying a lot” on the Qwen model, describing it as “very good” and “fast and cheap.”
Each business was asked to disclose any Chinese AI models deployed in their firms, and whether any independent security evaluations of the model. They were also asked to provide any internal analyses and communications related to the models, along with any customer data that could be at risk.
The Hill reached out to Airbnb and Anysphere for comment on the letters, first reported by Semafor
The push comes nearly a week after Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, wrote in a memo that the U.S. government has learned Chinese entities are leveraging thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking tactics to access proprietary information.
The models produced by distillation do not meet the full performance capabilities of the original but allow foreign actors to release products that appear comparable for a cheaper price.
The U.S. has sought to limit the transfer of U.S. technology to China amid the tight AI race. Trump came under backlash from his own party late last year over his decision to allow Nvidia to sell its H200 chips to China.
The H200 chips are more powerful than its H20 chips, which were developed with U.S. export controls in mind. After initially restricting sales earlier this year, the Trump administration reversed course and allowed Nvidia to sell the chips to China for a 15 percent cut of revenue.
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