World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family, has come under scrutiny over its connection to WorldClaw, a Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence platform that offers access to AI models developed by both U.S. and Chinese technology companies.
A Reuters review found that WorldClaw lists about 90 AI models on its routing service platform, with 43 coming from Chinese developers including Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai, DeepSeek and Moonshot. Several of those firms have been flagged by U.S. government agencies as security risks. The Department of Defense has designated Alibaba and Baidu as Chinese military-affiliated companies, while Z.ai is on the Commerce Department’s entity list and has been accused of advancing China’s military capabilities through advanced AI. U.S. officials have also accused DeepSeek and Moonshot of building their systems on intellectual property stolen from American rivals.
The connection between the two companies is financial. WorldClaw accepts USD1, World Liberty’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, as a form of payment for its AI services. USD1 is backed by traditional assets including U.S. Treasury securities, and the Trump family is entitled to a share of the interest earned from those reserves. World Liberty has raised approximately $1.4 billion from governance token sales, with the Trump family entitled to 75% of net token-sale proceeds. Reuters estimates total family crypto earnings at roughly $2.3 billion.
World Liberty’s head of growth, Ryan Fang, has also served as an external adviser to WorldClaw, focusing on USD1 adoption and partnerships. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have publicly promoted WorldClaw. Both companies and the White House have rejected conflict-of-interest concerns, saying WorldClaw is an independent business and that making AI models available does not constitute an endorsement of their developers.
Security specialists warn that Chinese AI models could expose users to data monitoring, censored responses or malicious code. WorldClaw states that user inputs may be shared with the companies providing the underlying models. The platform says it has more than 10,000 users and handles over 50 million requested tasks per day. The broader risk for World Liberty is that its commercial exposure to restricted Chinese technology partners could increase political, ethics and compliance scrutiny around USD1 as the stablecoin expands into new payment use cases.
