Trump-Backed Crypto Venture Partners With AI Platform Hosting Blacklisted Chinese Models
WorldClaw hosts 43 Chinese models, including firms targeted by Pentagon and Commerce Department sanctions
World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by President Donald Trump, is collaborating with Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence firm WorldClaw to promote the adoption of its USD1 stablecoin, according to a Reuters report published Monday.
Under the arrangement, WorldClaw accepts the USD1 stablecoin as payment for access to its platform, which aggregates 90 AI models. A total of 43 of those models were created by Chinese developers, including firms that have drawn scrutiny and sanctions from U.S. national security agencies.
The platform features AI models from Chinese firms Alibaba, Baidu, and Z.ai, alongside American offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic. World Liberty executive Ryan Fang serves as an adviser to WorldClaw, and the platform has received public promotion from Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Financial arrangements between the entities and any revenues earned by the Trump family remain undisclosed.
Defending the integration, World Liberty spokesperson David Wachsman stated that WorldClaw operates independently and emphasized that major American technology corporations routinely offer access to both U.S. and Chinese AI systems.
“This is a common and widely accepted approach,” David Wachsman told Reuters.
Federal regulatory actions against several Chinese providers hosted on WorldClaw have intensified in recent months. In January 2025, the Commerce Department added Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu AI, to its Entity List, restricting the firm’s capability to acquire U.S. technologies.
The Department of Defense added further restrictions in June, designating Alibaba and Baidu as “Chinese Military Companies Operating in the United States,” an action that blocks the Defense Department from entering into contracts with either entity.
Alibaba rejected the Pentagon’s decision, calling the designation “arbitrary and capricious” and declaring plans to litigate the decision in court. “Alibaba is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy,” an Alibaba spokesperson told Reuters.
Multiple Chinese developers accessible through WorldClaw also face allegations of unauthorized data scraping from American counterparts. Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax in February of using roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts to log over 16 million interactions with its Claude model to train competing systems through model distillation.
In response to those practices, Anthropic called on Congress in June to enact stiffer export controls and impose explicit penalties against large-scale model extraction. “We believe combating the threat of illicit distillation requires coordinated action between government and industry, and we will continue working with Congress and the administration to maintain American AI leadership,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Decrypt.
