Airbnb’s CEO says US ‘misunderstanding’ use of Chinese open-source AI models

Published Thu, May 21, 2026 · 08:24 AM

[NEW YORK] Airbnb chief executive officer Brian Chesky defended his company’s use of Chinese artificial intelligence models, saying US lawmakers who worry Chinese firms can access Americans’ user data are “misunderstanding” the technology.

Airbnb is not a customer of Alibaba or other Chinese companies, he said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Wednesday (May 21). “We are not providing data to any Chinese companies. They don’t have access to any data,” he said in an earlier interview with Bloomberg News, his first public response to a US House probe into Airbnb’s use of Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen large language model for its customer service chatbot.

“We’re primarily using a variety of open-source models, including US open-source models,” he added. “An open-source model does not have access to data. It doesn’t work that way. I think people need to understand how this stuff works.”

Last month, the House committees on China and homeland security sent a letter to Airbnb, asking for information about its use of Chinese AI models as part of an investigation into what they described as a Chinese campaign to “accelerate its AI capabilities by exploiting American innovation”.

The heads of the panels seized on an October interview with Bloomberg, in which Chesky said his company preferred “fast and cheap” Qwen in certain situations. The committee members cited the comments, noting “serious concerns about the national security and data-security implications” for Airbnb’s “American customers and for the integrity of its systems”.

Chesky said on Wednesday that the company is cooperating with the congressional committees to answer their questions.

The availability of low-cost AI models from China that can perform almost as well as costlier offerings from premier US labs sits at the heart of the escalating competition between the US and China to dominate the emerging technology. For cost-conscious enterprises, it makes less sense to use American tech if there are cheaper alternatives elsewhere.

Those alternatives are helping deliver business wins. Airbnb, for its part, has touted the rollout over the past year of its AI customer service agent, which is now able to handle 70 per cent of customer service tickets.

Airbnb is not alone in using Chinese technology to develop AI products. The same House committees that are probing Airbnb’s use of Chinese AI models served a similar letter to Anysphere, the company behind the popular Cursor AI coding tool. What’s more, seven of the 10 most-used models this month were developed by Chinese companies including Moonshot AI, Tencent Holdings and DeepSeek, according to token usage data from OpenRouter, a platform used by millions of developers to access various models.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, whose company offers both close-sourced and open source models, said on Tuesday that the ultimate question is whether the US is doing enough to stay in the lead.

“Companies are optimising for a lot of factors” and there will be a place for both open and close-sourced models, he said during a fireside chat at the Google I/O developer conference. “If it is open source with the right licences, it should matter less where it came from. With open source comes a community which is responsible for it, cares about it. So if something wrong is happening in that software, it’s not like it’s going to go unnoticed. That creates a level of trust for people to adopt that technology,” he said.

“I worry less about, ‘Are we adopting open source models from China?’ and more, ‘Are we doing enough in the US to make sure we are staying at the frontier?’” he added. BLOOMBERG