Chairmen Garbarino, Moolenaar Announce Joint Investigation into National Security Risks Posed by PRC AI Models April 29, 2026 WASHINGTON, D.C. –– Today, House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Andrew R. Garbarino (R-NY) and House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) announced a joint investigation into the national security and cybersecurity risks posed by the growing adoption of PRC-developed artificial intelligence models, including low-cost, open-weight, and API-accessible systems developed by Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. The investigation comes amid growing concern that PRC-based AI companies are using unauthorized model distillation and other illicit techniques to extract capabilities from leading American frontier models, then repackaging those capabilities into lower-cost models without the same safeguards included in the original American models, which are then marketed or made available to U.S. companies, developers, and consumers. While model distillation can be a legitimate AI development technique, distillation conducted through fraudulent accounts, proxy networks, evasion of access restrictions, or violations of U.S. companies’ terms of service raises serious concerns about model provenance, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and supply-chain risk. Read more in Semafor via Rachyl Jones As an initial step in the probe, the Chairmen sent letters to Anysphere and Airbnb, raising concerns about the companies’ use of or exposure to these risks through PRC-developed AI. The letters also follow an April 2026 memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy warning that foreign entities, primarily based in China, are conducting deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems through proxy accounts and other coordinated methods. In the letter to Anysphere, the Chairmen focus on Cursor’s Composer 2 model, which was reportedly built on an open-weight model developed by Moonshot AI, one of the PRC-based companies publicly implicated in large-scale distillation campaigns targeting American AI systems.