Regulations and moral standards on AI research is PERMISSIVE. We have seen the same "advantage" in Chinese stem cell and embryonic research as well.
If Google first publishes some result X, and Chinese researchers find this result, they are free to use this result to publish some result Y, regardless of whether Google opens an AI center in China.
The short answer is no. The field of research is completely fucked up. You are incentivized to explain your research in as much detail as is required to get a top publication (which honestly isn't much, just look at NIPS this year, there are a ton of overly vague, "exploratory" pubs that really describe jack-shit) but absolutely no further, as this could allow a competitor to fully continue your research and get the next major pub from it. So you want to describe enough so that people understand your research at a high level, but so that nobody can truly understand at a technical level what you've done.
So in essence no, research isn't something that is as freely communicable as publications. It really does require personal expertise, in the sense that there is a ton of knowledge contained in experts that you can't find anywhere in publications.