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,