Overview
- Two House committees led by Republicans opened a joint inquiry by sending formal letters to Airbnb and Anysphere seeking documents and in-person briefings.
- The letters ask for details on which Chinese AI models the firms use, any security checks on model weights before deployment, and the total amount of customer data processed by those models.
- Airbnb’s customer-service agent uses Alibaba’s Qwen model, which CEO Brian Chesky has described as very fast and low cost, and the tool was said to run on a mix of models including one from Alibaba.
- Anysphere’s new Composer 2 system was later disclosed to run on Kimi from Beijing-based Moonshot AI, positioning it as a cheaper alternative to top U.S. models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Committee leaders warn that PRC-linked models may embed censorship and hidden flaws, cite higher compliance with malicious prompts, tie the letters to a broader probe of Chinese labs like DeepSeek and MiniMax, and say the companies have not yet commented.