Christina Cacioppo of Vanta Says Paris Firms Switched to Chinese AI Over Access Fears
Paris software firms moved to Chinese AI models to keep their businesses running, customers told Christina Cacioppo of Vanta.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.496]Christina Cacioppo, co-founder and chief executive of security and compliance software company Vanta, said customers in France told her a couple of weeks ago that a lot of software companies in Paris now mostly use Chinese AI models. Those models are the underlying systems that power AI features.
For those companies, the customers told her, the issue was whether a model they built a business on would still be available to them.
Cacioppo said she was surprised by what she heard, and first guessed the cause was nationalism or anti-American feeling. A customer quickly corrected her: "absolutely not."
The customers told her they had switched after access to an American model was closed to non-Americans under Trump. She did not identify the model beyond that description.
They concluded there was a huge business continuity risk in relying on American models. They could not trust that a model would always be available, so they stopped building on them.
Questions people ask
What does it mean to build a business on an AI model?
To build on a model means to make your product depend on it for everyday functions, like answering questions, summarizing documents, or flagging security problems. If the model goes down, gets more expensive, or becomes unavailable in your country, your product breaks too. That is why companies treat continued access as a business continuity issue.
Can the U.S. actually cut foreigners off from American AI models?
Yes. The U.S. government can limit exports of advanced chips and AI technology on national security grounds, and has tightened rules around high end semiconductors and related tools. Separately, American AI companies sometimes restrict access by country themselves to comply with sanctions, regulations, or company policy. Foreign buyers watch both kinds of limits.
Are Chinese models good enough for serious business software?
For many routine business uses, yes. Models from Chinese labs such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot have scored close to leading American systems on several public benchmarks, and they are often cheaper to use. They are not ahead on every task, and some companies worry about censorship, data handling, and future restrictions in the other direction.