President Donald Trump's family-backed World Liberty Financial is accepting its USD1 stablecoin as payment for access to WorldClaw, an artificial intelligence platform that offers models from Chinese tech firms his administration has explicitly restricted over national security concerns.
World Liberty Financial, which issues the USD1 stablecoin, is 38 percent owned by the Trump family. Ryan Fang, a World Liberty executive, also advises WorldClaw. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have promoted the AI platform.
WorldClaw offers 90 AI models. Forty-three of them—47.8 percent—were developed by Chinese companies including Alibaba, Baidu, and Z.ai. The platform also provides access to models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The U.S. government has directly targeted some of these developers. In January 2025, the Commerce Department added Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, to its Entity List, restricting its access to U.S. technology on national security grounds. In June 2025, the Pentagon designated both Alibaba and Baidu as "Chinese Military Companies Operating in the United States," prohibiting the Defense Department from conducting business with either firm.
World Liberty spokesperson David Wachsman said WorldClaw operates independently from World Liberty Financial and that major U.S. firms commonly offer mixed Chinese and American AI models. Alibaba disputed the Pentagon designation, saying it is "not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy" and indicated plans to sue for removal.
Several Chinese AI firms on WorldClaw have faced accusations of intellectual property theft. In February 2025, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of conducting distillation attacks—using one AI model to extract capabilities from another. Anthropic said the companies allegedly used approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 16 million exchanges with its Claude model.
In response, Anthropic urged Congress in June 2025 to tighten export controls and establish penalties for large-scale model extraction. An Anthropic spokesperson said "combating the threat of illicit distillation requires coordinated action between government and industry" to maintain American AI leadership.
The specific financial terms between World Liberty Financial and WorldClaw remain undisclosed, preventing assessment of how much the Trump family has earned from a venture operating with U.S.-restricted entities.
