Airbnb CEO Addresses House Inquiry on Use of Chinese AI Model

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky defended the company's use of Chinese artificial intelligence models in response to a congressional inquiry. He stated that the company does not provide data to Chinese companies and that open-source models do not grant access to user data.

Chesky made the remarks in a Bloomberg TV interview earlier this week. The comments followed a letter sent last month by U.S. House committees on China and homeland security requesting clarification on Airbnb's use of Alibaba's Qwen model.

Background on the Inquiry The committees cited an October interview in which Chesky described Qwen as fast and cheap for certain tasks. The letter raised concerns about national security and data security implications for American customers. Committee chair John Moolenaar told Semafor that AI models trained under China's censorship regime could introduce vulnerabilities.

Chesky rejected the argument that Alibaba's Qwen carries structural risks from ideological conditioning.

Chinese open-source large language models have increased their share of global usage. An OpenRouter study of 100 trillion tokens showed their portion rising from 1.2 percent in late 2024 to nearly 30 percent by the end of 2025. A separate MIT and Hugging Face analysis found Chinese open-weight models accounted for 17.1 percent of global downloads in the year ending August 2025.

This figure exceeded the U.S. share of 15.86 percent for the first time. Alibaba Cloud's Qwen family surpassed 700 million downloads on Hugging Face by January 2026. Airbnb uses 13 AI models in total and relies heavily on Qwen, which reduced average customer service resolution time from nearly three hours to six seconds.

Related Legislative Proposal U.S.

Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Pete Ricketts introduced the bipartisan U.S. Tech PATH Act on Tuesday. The measure would create a State Department-led technology procurement office and authorize $500 million over five years. The bill aims to help allied governments acquire American cyber and digital technology.

Shaheen said the legislation would demonstrate that the United States can compete on technology with a better offer. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said companies optimize for multiple factors when choosing models. He added that open-source models with proper licenses should be evaluated on merit rather than origin.