Trump Commerce pick slams China: 'Stop using our tools to compete'

Howard Lutnick, President Trump's nominee to lead the Commerce Department, slammed China for allegedly using U.S.-manufactured technology to compete with American artificial intelligence (AI) firms after Chinese AI startup DeepSeek took the internet and stock market by storm.

"I think they [China] only care about themselves and seek to harm us. And so we need to protect ourselves," Lutnick said Wednesday when asked during his confirmation hearing how he will address competition threats from China.

"We need to drive our innovation and we need to stop helping them. You know, open platforms — Meta's open platform let DeepSeek rely on it. Nvidia's chips, which they bought tons of, and they found their ways around, drive their DeepSeek model. It's got to end," he continued.

"If they are going to compete with us, let them compete, but stop using our tools to compete with us."

Lutnick was referring to Meta's decision in 2023 to publicly release some of its AI technology to allow the public to build their own chatbots. The move faced scrutiny at the time as other AI firms chose to keep their technology under lock and key.

A spokesperson for Meta said DeepSeek is "proof that China will use open source to try and win the global AI race."

"Llama is the best chance we have to compete," the spokesperson continued, referring to Meta's family of large language models. "There are reports that a variety of AI models —including closed models — were used to build the R1 base model and Llama was not one of them. In fact, Llama is America’s best open source competitor to China’s DeepSeek.”

OpenAI, earlier Wednesday, confirmed it is looking into whether DeepSeek improperly obtained data through its closed models.

Lutnick said he plans to be "very strong" on his message if the Senate confirms him.

"I'm thrilled to oversee BIS [Bureau of Industry and Security] and I'm thrilled to coordinate and empower BIS with tariffs that will improve the strength when we say no, the answer's got to be no," he said.

DeepSeek's new AI model, R1, surged in popularity over the weekend, sparking a significant sell-off in the tech sector as it raised larger questions about the future of American-made AI and the billions of dollars U.S. firms have invested into AI infrastructure.

DeepSeek's app jumped to the top of Apple's App Store over the weekend and has remained in the No. 1 spot on the store's top free apps for at least three days. ChatGPT maker OpenAI fell behind at No. 2 on the list.

The company, founded in May 2023, claims to have spent just $5.6 million to train its latest models, while maintaining it had limited access to chips amid the Biden administration's export controls on semiconductor equipment to China.

DeepSeek claimed last year it used just 2,000 second-tier Nvidia chips to train its models v3 and R1, though some AI business leaders have cast doubt about the company's claims.

Lutnick voiced doubts about what went into the R1 model, telling the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that he doesn't "believe that DeepSeek was done above board."

"That's nonsense," he quipped.

When asked about Lutnick's claims, a Nvidia spokesperson said the company is "ready to work with the Administration as it pursues its own approach to AI."

"The thresholds set by the Biden Administration are based on performance levels reached five years ago and achieved by leading gaming and workstation products," the spokesperson added.

Earlier this week, a Nvidia spokesperson told The Hill the Chinese company is “an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test time scaling.”

“DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant,” the spokesperson said. “Inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking. We now have three scaling laws: pre-training and post-training, which continue, and new test-time scaling.”

Lutnick was later asked how the U.S. plans to continue its vigilance against leaking investments, intellectual property and technological breakthroughs to adversary countries.

"How could it be more clear than this week when DeepSeek, a Chinese AI, says they were able to create things direct cheap? How? By leveraging what they've taken from us. It's outrageous and it needs to be addressed," he said.

The Hill reached out to DeepSeek for further comment.

Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, said Wednesday DeepSeek is a "wake-up call" for the U.S. to be the leader in AI development, but he appeared to brush off concerns it will exceed the performance of American-made AI.

"I think the Chinese companies are catching up very fast," Sacks told Fox News. "We haven’t lost our leadership here. The DeepSeek R1 model is basically comparable in capabilities to the OpenAI 01 model, which came out about four months ago. So they are kind of hot on our heels here, and I think we basically have somewhere between a three and six month lead on them. But they are catching up very, very fast."

Updated at 1:34 p.m. EST

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