A Pentagon Official Just Called a Top AI Figure a “Village Idiot” — and the China Policy Fight Is Getting Personal

War Department Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael publicly mocked former White House AI adviser Dean Ball on Sunday, calling him the “supreme village idiot” of the AI industry amid a dispute over Chinese AI models.

Michael responded after Ball suggested the Trump administration should discourage American companies from using Chinese-made AI. “Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. [Dean Ball] is that for AI,” Michael wrote on X. He added that Ball has “perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points).”

Ball, now a top executive at OpenAI and former Senior Policy Advisor for AI under Trump, had posted that multiple federal departments and Congress had blocked employees from using Chinese AI. China’s open-source Kimi K3 model, released Thursday, ranked highly in testing and is described as powerful yet cheaper to produce.

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who previously served as Trump’s AI czar, weighed in critically on Ball’s position, warning against the “weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool.” Ball has argued that an open-weight-model-dominant world could lead to “full AI communism,” which he said is precisely what China proposes.

The exchange highlights growing tension over how the United States should handle advanced Chinese AI systems as competition intensifies.