Justin Sun said his decision to publicly discuss his former girlfriend, a 50 million yuan bride price, and a lawsuit seeking the return of 30 million yuan was not a marketing move, but a personal expression made against the advice of both his team and, in part, Claude.
In an interview with Phoenix New Media Technology, Sun said he did not think much about outside criticism before publishing the post. "I wrote an article myself and posted it on my own Twitter. It was just my own feelings and thoughts. It was really that simple," he said.
The post pushed Sun back into the spotlight, this time through entertainment trending lists rather than crypto headlines. He told the outlet he had not even checked Weibo yet, despite more than 20 trending topics tied to his name.
Sun has spent years at the center of public attention
The interview notes that Sun has long been one of China’s most visible internet entrepreneurs. Over the past decade, he has repeatedly drawn attention through highly public events, from his image as a "post-90s entrepreneurial leader" and founder of TRON to his 2019 purchase of Warren Buffett’s charity lunch for $4.567888 million.
After the Buffett lunch controversy peaked in 2019, Sun publicly apologized and said he felt "deeply guilty" about "excessive marketing" and being "keen on hype."
He remained in the headlines after that. In 2024, he bought Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s banana artwork Comedian for $6.2 million and later ate the banana, drawing global media coverage once again.
The scrutiny around Sun has not been limited to publicity tactics. In 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Sun and related companies, alleging wash trading to create a false appearance of active TRX trading and undisclosed payments to celebrities for promoting crypto assets. In March 2026, the two sides settled the case after nearly three years. Rainberry agreed to pay $10 million, while Sun and related parties neither admitted nor denied the allegations.
Why he made the post public
Phoenix New Media Technology asked Sun directly whether the post was another example of attention-driven promotion, given his history of highly visible public moves and his earlier apology for over-marketing.
Sun rejected that framing. He said he made the post because he wanted to speak about his own emotions. When asked why he chose to speak publicly while the matter had already entered legal proceedings, he said the litigation had been handed over to lawyers and any disclosure in court would be determined according to legal procedure, while the article itself was mainly an outlet for his feelings.
The interviewer also raised the issue that the account was largely one-sided, that the other party had not responded point by point, and that Sun’s article itself said some content was fictionalized. Sun replied that "for the vast majority of it, I think it is a truthful account consistent with what I intended." He added that he could not guarantee every detail was "100%," which is why he noted fictional elements, but said his own thoughts and what he meant to express were "100% confirmed."
His team warned of possible fallout
Sun acknowledged that his team had concerns before the post went live. He said he spoke with them first and understood their worry that a tech entrepreneur suddenly dominating entertainment trends might affect cooperation with partners or his professional image.
Still, he went ahead with it. "I’m not a machine. I’m also a person. I’m not purely AI," Sun said, explaining that he still had thoughts of his own that he wanted to express.
According to Sun, his team told him the post could bring changes and might even affect some partnerships, but ultimately tolerated the decision. By the time of the interview, he said he had just come down from another event and had not yet had time to see how partners were reacting.
Written over two nights in Bhutan
Sun told the outlet that the article, which he described as around 6,000 words long, took more than 10 hours to complete over the course of several days. He said he was in Bhutan at the time, dealing with a time difference and daytime company work, so he could only write late at night when no one was contacting him. He said he barely slept over the two nights in which the article was written.
He also said that although he once entered Peking University after winning first prize in the New Concept Writing Competition, he had not really written articles after that and had simply put his thoughts into words this time.
Phoenix New Media Technology said that during a conversation lasting nearly half an hour, Sun used the word "confused" three times and "torn" five times. Before publishing, he sent the article to Claude for feedback. Claude gave suggestions, but Sun did not accept them.
The first serious doubt about Claude
Sun has publicly argued in the past that people should listen to AI "100%." In this interview, he said that principle largely still holds for him, but this case was different.
He said he usually asks Claude about many things, not only matters of life but also company business. "What Claude says, I listen to. That really is the case," he said. But on this issue, he said, he did not know whether Claude’s judgment was right or wrong, and that uncertainty left him feeling lost.
When asked whether he had ever before experienced such strong doubt about AI’s judgment, Sun said no. He said many decisions at his company are already being made by Claude and other AI systems and that the daily value involved runs into the millions and tens of millions of U.S. dollars. He also said audits and many review processes are handled automatically by AI. Even so, this personal matter became the one area where he and Claude did not reach the same conclusion.
He added that when he sent the article to Claude, the model was "a little unhappy" at first and said, in effect, that Sun’s emotional problems had nothing to do with Claude’s own decision-making and that it did not want to "take the blame." Sun said Claude’s views had in fact influenced his thinking. When the interviewer remarked that people were now making Claude take the blame, Sun replied, "To some extent, yes."
The lawsuit is with lawyers now
Asked whether he was still in contact with Jing Tian, Sun said he was not.
On why the lawsuit was focused on recovering the bride price even though the two were no longer in contact, Sun said first that it was a lawyer’s recommendation. Second, he said, it carried a sense of irony because it might be "the only remaining connection" between them. "Apart from this matter, there is no other connection," he said, adding that merely thinking about it was mentally draining.
When asked whether AI also played a role in the decision to sue, Sun said the legal decision had been handed over to lawyers. He described the issue as deeply consuming and said he did not want to spend more energy thinking about it. Writing the article, he said, was his own way of releasing what he still felt inside, while the rest should be left to counsel.
He says the conflict has affected his work
Sun gave a direct answer when asked whether the emotional dispute had already affected his day-to-day work: "Yes. Of course it has."
He said his own feelings and AI’s judgment came into conflict in this case, and that he recorded that conflict without reservation in the article. By contrast, he said, there is usually no friction when Claude handles routine company work such as audit reports. This was the rare case where disagreement appeared and where he could not say with confidence what was right or wrong.
Asked what outcome would count as a real ending, Sun said he had not thought too far ahead. Many things are difficult to judge in the moment, he said, and the future result is still unknown. What he could do was put his confusion and uncertainty into the article.
Still heavily reliant on AI tools
Despite this episode, Sun did not back away from his broader use of AI. He said he frequently uses Claude Code for coding and also uses it to check company code and other internal work. He said his company also uses Codex.
He added that the company has built an AI services platform called B.AI that integrates domestic tools including Zhipu, MoonShot, and Minimax. In practice, he said, he consults a range of AI products, though Claude and Codex remain the tools he uses most often.
Looking back at his earlier statement that people should listen to AI "100%," Sun said that view was expressed at a time when AI was extremely hot and that the wording itself was indeed absolute. The core idea, he said, was to stop listening to other people’s opinions and instead make decisions based on AI. After this episode, however, he said he may have experienced the first moment in his life when he genuinely questioned an AI decision.
At the end of the interview, he was asked whether asking Doubao might have produced a different answer. Sun said he had not asked Doubao and did not know what result it would have given. He added that Doubao is a mobile app, while he mainly works on a computer and therefore tends to use desktop tools such as Codex.
The interview was published by Phoenix New Media Technology under the byline of Dong Yuqing. For Sun, the episode did more than create another burst of public attention. It also marked a shift he described in his own words: a person who once advocated following AI "100%" chose, this time, not to follow it completely.