중국의 인공지능 모델들이 미국의 최첨단 모델들과 경쟁력을 갖추면서 미국 실리콘밸리와 워싱턴 정치권에 큰 위기감과 보호무역주의적 반응이 일고 있습니다. 기술 업계는 과장된 공포에 휩쓸리기보다, 중국 AI 규제가 소수 빅테크 기업들의 이익만 편중시키는 것은 아닌지 냉정하게 고민해야 할 시점입니다.
번역된 본문
중국 기업인 문샷 AI(Moonshot AI)의 최신 AI 모델인 '킴(Kimi)'의 출시는 미국의 기술 경쟁력과 오픈소스(Open Source) 대 폐쇄형(Proprietary) AI 모델에 대한 논쟁에 다시 불을 지폈습니다. 소셜 미디어에서도 이에 관한 논의가 활발했지만, 워싱턴 D.C.의 뒤편에서도 비슷한 논쟁이 벌어지고 있는 것으로 보입니다. OpenAI와 Anthropic이 중국의 오픈소스 모델에 대한 우려를 품고 규제 기관에 로비를 벌인 것으로 알려졌기 때문입니다. TechCrunch의 'Equity' 팟캐스트 최신 에피소드에서 코스텐 코로섹(Kirsten Korosec), 션 오케인(Sean O'Kane), 그리고 저(앤서니 하)는 왜 이 문제가 이렇게 뜨거운 감자가 되었는지 논의했습니다. 션은 주말을 X(옛 트위터)에서 말다툼하며 보내기보다는 밖으로 나가 풀이라도 밟으며 정신을 차려야 한다고 말하면서도, 이번 상황이 과거에 겪었던 과도한 패닉의 반복처럼 느껴진다고 지적했습니다. 실리콘밸리의 모두가 '무언가가 나타나서 모든 것을 쓸어버릴 것'이라고 기대하고 있다는 겁니다. 또한 코스텐은 중국 AI 모델에 무거운 규제를 가하는 것이 소수 기업들에게만 주로 이익이 될 수 있다고 짚었습니다. "우리가 미국이 AI 경쟁에서 승리하도록 가속하고 보장하는 것인가요, 아니면 특정 선도 기업들이 다른 기업들보다 더 잘하게 만드는 것인가요?" 이해를 돕기 위해 대화의 일부를 길이와 명확성을 위해 편집해 요약했습니다.
앤서니 하(Anthony Ha): 중국 AI를 둘러싼 논쟁을 지켜본 분들이라면, 딥시크(DeepSeek)가 출시되었을 때의 상황과 매우 익숙하게 느껴질 것입니다. 기본적으로 중국 모델이 나오면, 일부 벤치마크에서 최첨단 모델들과 비슷하거나 경쟁력 있는 성능을 보여주고, 기술 업계의 일부 사람들이 정신을 잃고 패닉에 빠지는 패턴입니다. OpenAI의 임원이 이에 대해 게시물을 올리면서 이 논쟁은 더 큰 주목을 받았습니다. 하지만 전반적으로 이런 반복적인 질문이 늘 존재합니다. 중국 기업이 적어도 특정 측면에서는 미국 기업을 물리칠 수 있는가? 그리고 그것을 훨씬 더 저렴하고 훨씬 더 개방된 방식으로 해낼 수 있는가? 입니다.
션 오케인(Sean O'Kane): 네, 이번 상황은 여러모로 과거의 과도한 패닉이 반복되는 느낌을 줍니다. 제가 가장 흥미롭게 생각하는 부분 중 하나는 사람들이 그 무언가가 도래해서 다른 모든 것을 완전히 파괴할 것이라고 지나치게 기대하고 맞을 준비를 하고 있다는 점입니다. 지난주만 해도 제가 가장 인상 깊게 본 사례는 사람들이 "세상에, 킴(Kimi)이 불과 30분 만에 macOS의 완벽한 복제본을 만들었다!"며 자랑하던 것이었습니다. 확실히 macOS의 외형을 꽤 멋지게 재현하긴 했지만, 그것은 OS(운영체제)가 아닙니다. 기술 업계의 모든 사람들이 너무 예민해져서 우리는 이런 일들이 계속해서 반복되는 것을 보고 있습니다. 특히 일부 중국 모델이 출시될 때마다 이런 기대감이 생기는데, 이것이 지난주말에 사람들이 그런 식으로 반응했던 핵심적인 이유라고 생각합니다. (참고로, 주말이니 밖으로 나가서 풀이라도 밟고 현실로 돌아오세요. 업계의 모든 사람들이 주말 내내 트위터에서 말다툼을 하고 있었습니다.) 하지만 이런 예민함은 저에게 매우 흥미롭습니다. 일주일이 지난 지금, 아무도 일주일 전처럼 세상이 종말을 맞이할 것이라고 느끼지 않기 때문입니다.
코스텐 코로섹(Kirsten Korosec): 우리 기자 중 한 명인 팀 펀홀즈(Tim Fernholz)가 미국 내에서 벌어지는 이런 집단적 심리 상태를 분석한 훌륭한 기사를 썼습니다. 그는 여러 가지 이유를 지적하며 하나의 결론을 내리는데, 제가 그의 결론을 대신 내리고 싶지는 않지만 한 가지가 가장 핵심으로 부각됩니다. 중국의 오픈 웨이트(Open-weight) 모델들이 암묵적으로 친중국적인 편향을 가질 수 있다는 우려와 보안 위험 및 가이드라인에 대한 걱정도 있습니다. 하지만 여기에는 보호무역주의와 누가 소위 말하는 '경쟁에서 승리'할 것인가 하는 더 큰 아이디어가 자리 잡고 있습니다. 미국이 이길 것인가, 아니면 중국이 이길 것인가? 그리고 그것이 공포의 상당 부분을 주도하고 있는 것처럼 보입니다. 앤서니, 어떻게 생각하시나요?
앤서니: 전적으로 동의합니다. 중국이라는 요소가 항상 일정 수준의 히스테리를 더하게 됩니다. 물론 미국이 다양한 산업 분야에서 중국과 어떻게 경쟁하고 있는지에 대해 우려하지 말라는 것은 아닙니다. 하지만 반응이 너무 과도하게 치솟곤 합니다. 이번 일은 몇 년 전 틱톡(TikTok)을 둘러싼 논의를 떠올리게 합니다. 그리고 다시, 이...
The launch of the latest AI model from a Chinese company — Moonshot AI’s Kimi — reignited debates around American competitiveness and open versus proprietary AI. While there was plenty of conversation on social media , it seems the debate is also happening behind the scenes in Washington, D.C., where OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly lobbied regulators with concern about open Chinese models. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast , Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed why this seems to be such a hot button issue. Beyond suggesting that certain folks should “touch grass” rather than spending their weekends arguing on X, Sean noted that in many ways, this “feels like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts,” with everyone in Silicon Valley “expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away.” And Kirsten noted that putting heavy restrictions on Chinese AI models could primarily benefit a handful of companies: “Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others? Keep reading for an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Anthony Ha: For folks who have followed the discourse around Chinese AI, this will probably be very, very familiar from the launch of DeepSeek, where basically a Chinese model comes out; on some benchmarks, it does as well, or at least seems competitive with some of the frontier models; and a certain portion of the tech industry loses their mind. Some of this [debate] got extra scrutiny because one of the people posting about it was [an executive] at OpenAI. But in general, there [is] this recurring question of: Can Chinese companies beat US companies, at least in some aspects, and do it much more cheaply and in a much more open way? Sean O'Kane: Yeah, there are many elements of this that feel like we're seeing repeats of prior freakouts. I think one of my favorites is: Everybody is so ready [for] and so expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away. And I think my favorite example of that this past week was people showing off that “My gosh, Kimi made in 30 minutes an entire replication of macOS .” And yeah, it made a pretty impressive graphical reproduction of what macOS looks like, but it's not an OS. We keep seeing these things happen over and over again, where everybody's so jumpy in the tech industry. And I think in particular, with some of the Chinese models that come out, there's this expectation, and I think this gets to the core of why people reacted the way they reacted last weekend. (Also, by the way: Go outside, touch grass, it's the weekend. Everybody in the industry was trading barbs on Twitter all weekend.) But this jumpiness is really interesting to me because we're now a week out and I don't think anybody's feeling like the end is nigh like they were a week ago. Kirsten Korosec: We have a really great story by one of our reporters, Tim Fernholz, who tries to unpack the psychosis around this here in the United States . He points to a number of reasons. And concludes — and I don't want to conclude it for him, but I think that there's one that rises more to the top than others. There's concerns that these Chinese open weight models might have an implicit bias towards China, there's another worry about security risks and guardrails. But there's also a pretty big idea here, which is protectionism, and who is going to quote-unquote “win the race”? Is it going to be the US or China? And that seems to be driving a lot of what the fear is. I don't know, Anthony, if you agree with that? Anthony: I completely agree. I think the China aspect always adds this certain level of hysteria. And that's not to say that people shouldn't be concerned about how the U.S. stacks up against China across different industries. But it gets so amped up. The other thing this reminds me of is the discussion around TikTok a few years ago. And again, it wasn't that I thought that the concerns around TikTok were totally made up, but that the level of how panicked people got — it seems as soon as you add the word China to any discussion, things just ramp up dramatically. And then in this case, it's linked to this discussion about open [weights] and this idea that AI is so powerful and so dangerous that the only way we can control it is with these proprietary models from these American frontier companies. Obviously, most people saying this [have] reasons why they want to say that. David Sacks, who was the AI czar for the Trump administration [and] now has a different role in the Trump administration, was shouting on X about how, “I can't believe people are opposing data centers, we're tying ourselves in knots, there's too much regulation.” And so it's a way to argue for the positions that they already had around AI. “My gosh, if China beats us, that's unthinkable, so you have to do what I want to do anyway.” Kirsten: Right, and if you were to put across-the-board bans on Chinese open weight models — I'm not saying that there aren't real concerns here, but let's just play that out. If we were to do that, it would benefit models created by OpenAI, for instance, and it would force enterprises to use those as opposed to using models like Kimi. So you really have to ask the question: Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others? Sean: At this point, we should say a lot of this discussion really got kicked off by the head of strategic futures at OpenAI, Dean Ball, who was the first one to come out with this really long post mentioning some of these concerns . Part of me thinks the reaction to this was because people disagreed with what Dean wrote. Part of me also thinks the reaction was driven by the fact that he kind of just said the thing out loud. He basically said the US should create regulatory FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — and muck up the ability for these open weight models to compete with the US. [Ball later backed away from this argument .] And to me, I think you can read in some of the responses from folks, like, “You're not supposed to say that out loud, Dean.” Topics AI , Government & Policy , kimi , moonshot ai , OpenAI When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission . This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Anthony Ha Anthony Ha is TechCrunch's weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City. You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com . View Bio October 13 - 15 San Francisco Scale faster. Grow your portfolio. Gain practical expertise. No matter your goal, Disrupt can empower you. Save up to $330 toda y! 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