Chinese AI models used to write code may be creating a hidden security risk for U.S.companies, federal officials and government contractors, per a new report published by a major defense contractor specializing in cyber security.Booz Allen published a report in late May warning the federal government, private software developers and workers in critical industries that the presence of code written by popular Chinese AI models within the supply chain may be making the United States more vulnerable to bad faith actors.
These vulnerabilities aren’t simple backdoors, Booz Allen reports, but rather come in the form of Chinese large language models producing lower-quality, and thus easier to breach, code when they believe they are being prompted by an American.Chinese models are generally cheaper than their Western counterparts and work well enough to keep companies interested, a dynamic that has led to increased adoption in the United States and put some policymakers and national security experts on edge."I’d say there’s an 80% chance they’re using a Chinese open-source model," Martin Casado, a general partner at the major venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said in November 2025 when asked about their prevalence among start ups.Major U.S.
firms such as Meta, Airbnb and Perplexity are also reportedly using Chinese models.The DeepSeek AI app is shown on a smartphone screen with the Chinese flag in the background.(Dado Ruvic/Reuters)IT'S TIME TO BAN CHINESE AI APP DEEPSEEK FROM 'GOVERNMENT DEVICES,' STATE AGS URGE CONGRESS"The first link in the software supply chain is no longer the code.
It’s the AI models behind it," the Booz Allen report reads."As U.S.
developers increasingly rely on AI to generate, debug, and secure code, we must confront a fundamental question: can the AI models writing and powering our nation’s code be trusted?"In an attempt to answer this question, Booz Allen compared four of the most widely used Chinese models — Kimi, Qwen, M...