Trump-Backed Crypto Venture Links to Platform Selling Restricted Chinese AI

A cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family is financially linked to a Hong Kong-based platform that resells artificial intelligence models from Chinese companies the U.S. government has restricted on national security grounds. The arrangement, reported by Reuters on August 17, 2026, places the Trump family in a position to potentially profit from Americans accessing the very technology his administration is working to limit.

World Liberty Financial, the Trump-linked crypto firm, is connected to WorldClaw, a platform offering access to about 90 AI models. A review found that 43 of these models come from Chinese developers, including Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Moonshot. Several of these firms face direct U.S. government penalties. The Department of Defense has designated Alibaba and Baidu as Chinese military-aligned companies, barring the Pentagon from working with them. Z.ai is on the Commerce Department's entity list, which restricts its access to U.S. technology. U.S. officials have also accused DeepSeek and Moonshot of building their systems on stolen American intellectual property.

The financial connection runs through World Liberty's...