If you do the math, they don't have a choice. If China captures America's AI market it'll cause a major depression. They'll give it the BYD treatment, though it'll be a lot less effective.
This makes no sense, 99% of the people using Chinese models are using them via Western inference providers who are running them and serving them to people over openrouter or whatever. If anyone is stealing your data it would be an American or European inference provider. A model has no ability to send data anywhere.
China bad by default, right?
And apparently OpenAI and Anthropic think so, too - why else would they try so hard to ban them instead of outcompeting them?