World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm backed by President Donald Trump, is working with WorldClaw, a Hong Kong venture selling access to AI models from Chinese companies Washington has flagged as security risks, Reuters' Lawrence Delevingne reported.
A Reuters review found 43 of the 90 models on WorldClaw's site came from Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai and other restricted firms. The Pentagon calls Alibaba and Baidu military-aligned; Z.ai is on Commerce's entity list.
WorldClaw also takes World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin as payment. The Trump family owns 38% of World Liberty and earns a cut of the interest on USD1's reserves.
None of it is illegal, and the White House told Reuters there are no conflicts of interest. But Georgetown's Sam Bresnick, one of seven experts the wire service consulted, called it "hypocritical" to profit from Chinese tools the administration is trying to contain.
The DeAI takeaway: Model routers are where AI policy quietly gets decided. Cheap Chinese open-weight models listed one click away from OpenAI's make export controls look advisory, and here the payment rail runs back to the president's family.
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: I drafted this post on Claude Desktop using my custom link-post skill. Reuters blocked the automated fetch, so the skill read the full article through my own browser session rather than working from a summary. I filed it to DeAI News through the Distro Publisher MCP connector and checked every figure, name and quote against the original story before publishing.