Trump's World Liberty backs WorldClaw, Chinese AI gateway

Forty-three of the ninety AI models available through Hong Kong-based WorldClaw were built by Chinese companies the Trump administration itself has flagged as national security risks, including Alibaba, Baidu and Z.ai. Its payment rail is USD1, the stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial. The Trump family owns 38% of that venture, and Reuters reports it has generated about $1.4 billion for them from token sales.

Alibaba and Baidu sit on the Pentagon's list of Chinese military-aligned companies. Z.ai is on the Commerce Department's entity list, which the administration uses to cut those firms off from US technology. WorldClaw serves all three inside the same catalog as OpenAI and Anthropic, and accepts USD1 in payment.

'As the US government tries to respond to the rise and threat of Chinese AI, it seems hypocritical to go out through WorldClaw to use these tools from China to try and make a bunch of money,' Sam Bresnick of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology told Reuters.

WorldClaw's own claim: more than 10,000 users and 50 million requested tasks a day. Donald Trump Jr. has promoted a contest whose winners would meet him at Mar-a-Lago. Eric Trump called the tie-up 'the future of finance.' World Liberty spokesman David Wachsman defended it as 'a common and widely accepted approach,' noting that major US firms similarly offer Chinese models. That pattern showed up again this month when Apple was cleared by Beijing to train its own China LLM with Alibaba.

Daniel Remler of the Center for a New American Security, a former State Department policy adviser, flagged the risks: Chinese government monitoring, censored outputs, malicious code injection.

The arrangement lands mid-stretch on a policy story we've been tracking closely, alongside the State Department push telling 35 nations to pick between US and Chinese AI stacks.