Pentagon Official Calls Ex-White House AI Architect ‘Village Idiot’ In China Policy Spat

A senior Pentagon official publicly mocked former White House artificial intelligence adviser Dean Ball on Sunday over regulation of Chinese artificial intelligence models.

War Department Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael unloaded on Ball — now a top executive at OpenAI — when Ball suggested the Trump administration should discourage use of Chinese-made AI by American companies, Axios reported.

“Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. [Dean Ball’ is that for AI,” Michael wrote in a Sunday post on X, explaining that restrictions on DeepSeek and High Flyer came from a 2026 act of Congress. “Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points).”

China’s open-source AI model, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, was publicly released Thursday. Kimi is as powerful as OpenAI and Anthropic’s systems and cheaper to produce, according to the Telegraph.

Moonshot’s servers were overwhelmed by users trying the new Kimi model, so the company paused new subscriptions on Sunday, the outlet reported. The model’s code is free to download and modify.

Kimi K3 ranked first for front-end coding Thursday, even beating Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, according to AI testing platform Arena. 

“We have nothing additional to offer and refer you back to Hon. Michael’s X post,” a War Department official told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The departments of war, transportation, energy, agriculture, commerce, NASA, and Congress have all blocked their employees from using Chinese AI, citing ill-justified claims of danger,” Ball wrote on X Sunday morning, several hours before Michael’s post. “This already has sent a message to regulated firms. All of this happened during this admin.”

The White House, OpenAI, Michael and Ball each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

“I’m not sure whether Dean Ball is confessing to a regulatory capture strategy or simply predicting this will happen (he now says the latter),” David Sacks, a venture capitalist who served as Trump’s first AI czar, wrote on X Sunday morning. “Either way, the weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable.”

“The leading closed labs, already a duopoly in terms of AI model revenue, want the government to eliminate their open source competition,” Sacks added.

“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes,” Ball said in an X post about Moonshot’s Kimi model.

Ball, Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, served as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology under President Donald Trump for four months in 2025, according to his biography. During his tenure, he created America’s AI Action Plan in July 2025.