Think about it, where are you gonna get 10000 H100s?
Best you or I can hope for is to fine tune the models the big guys make "open source". None of which will be as serviceable as their closed models.
Also model performance follows a power law. There are strongly diminishing results, where after some point throwing twice as much money at the problem only gains you 1% accuracy. OpenAI knows this, so they're all in on regulatory capture.
[1] - "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster"
Who cares if Chinese AGI is a year behind OpenAI/Anthropic. At some level, progress will stall and then OpenAI/Anthropic will be on the clock before being undercut out of business on price.
They are probably just positioning now for when that happens and they have to become some kind of regulated utility for US government AI use.
Just another example of having our head up our ass as Americans. Seems like what we are doing will almost guarantee most the world outside the US is using Chinese AI in the future.
China is too big. This was going to happen eventually. Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether you'd fall back gracefully like Western Europe, now ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether you'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life.
Eisenhower 1953 said "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Nobody listened. Americans think life is a Marvel movie, and they are Iron Man. Turns out conflict is not a long-term winning strategy.
The current leaders basically need to either (1) break through the capability ceiling before everybody else catches up, or (2) construct law/regulation that keeps everybody else out of the game. #1 is uncertain, but #2 is well-understood business.
Since they all share that same interest (they'll be duking it with each other either way), the result is an "industry wide" effort to artificially close the door behind them.