America’s Companies Keep Flirting With Security Nightmare That’s ‘100 Times’ Worse Than TikTok

A rising San Francisco human resources startup’s use of a blacklisted Chinese AI lab’s model is setting off alarm bells as Beijing continues to reel in American companies.

Rippling touts itself as a one-stop-shop AI platform for human resources, information technology and finance that services over 20,000 U.S. companies, per its website. The model’s maker, Z.ai, also known as Zhipu, had already made it on to a U.S. government entity list months earlier over its ties to the Chinese military.

“Any data that transits an API through servers based in China is at risk of deliberate data exfiltration and intelligence collection. This is the same problem we’ve had with TikTok, but scaled up to be 100 times worse as people are uploading sensitive personal information. They’re not making fun videos of kids dancing, but asking for pretty sensitive advice about every aspect of their lives as they’re using AI systems,” Ryan Fedusiak, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who focuses on China and AI-related issues, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Open models “can be tampered with in ways that are very difficult to detect, and we haven’t seen a huge number of attacks like this yet. But I do worry that the potential is certainly there,” Fedusiak warned.

Rippling is not the only company to take Chinese AI for a test drive. Giants like DoorDash and small startups are increasingly adopting Chinese AI models because they provide nearly-frontier level performance at far less cost than Anthropic and OpenAI, Fortune reported. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in 2025 the company used Alibaba’s Qwen AI model, referring to it as “fast and cheap,” per NPR.

Rippling did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF about the extent to which the company uses Chinese AI models and how it protects its clients’ data. Zhipu also did not respond.

‘85% Cheaper’

Rippling CEO Parker Conrad in July on X credited Zhipu’s GLM 5.2 model, or Z.ai’s frontier open-source model, after the company found the model performed nearly as well as frontier, closed AI models at substantially less cost.

“This is why access to open weights matters – GLM 5.2 is 85% cheaper but nearly identical performance,” he wrote.

The AI human resources startup mainly uses OpenAI and Anthropic as its primary AI models, an AI usage guide published on the company’s website shows. The company bars its AI service providers from storing and using client data to train AI models.