General James ‘Spider’ Marks warns closed AI systems pose national security risks as China closes the gap

Retired US Army General James “Spider” Marks, one of the military’s most experienced intelligence figures, is sounding the alarm on a problem that should feel familiar to anyone in crypto: closed systems controlled by a handful of powerful entities are a liability, not an asset. His argument centers on the growing friction between Washington and Silicon Valley’s biggest AI companies, whose proprietary, closed-source models increasingly underpin national security infrastructure. Marks contends that this arrangement creates fragile dependencies at exactly the wrong moment, as Chinese AI capabilities are advancing faster than most people realize. China’s Kimi K3 changes the calculus The catalyst for Marks’ concerns has a name: Kimi K3. Unveiled on July 17 by Beijing-based startup Moonshot AI, the model packs 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1 million-token context window. What makes K3 genuinely notable isn’t just its size. It’s the first open-source model to operate in the near-3-trillion-parameter category, and it reportedly rivals the front-end coding capabilities of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT variants. Moonshot AI plans to release the model’s full weights by July 27, mea...