I find the narrative that Chinese researchers are stealing AI technology from the US very weird indeed. I have been working in AI for more than 30 years and in the last 15 years almost every major paper on the topic has had at least one Chinese author. In 2018 I went to conference to Florence and 60% of the speakers were Chinese.
They sent their students to every lab in the world to train them and to advance in the field as much as they could. And today it is paying off.
Also, if you watch the video that was released by OpenAI for the O1 presentation, almost no researchers in the team was American. Most of them were either European or Asian. So yeah!!! The US is number 1 in AI, but without much of local players. It reminds me of the British football championship, which is one of the best in Europe, but where the national team is not much of a powerhouse.