The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
Perhaps the question should instead be "Why are these Western AI companies getting insane valuations on dubious ROI, and how can these Chinese models run on a fraction of the infrastructure?"
I feel like that is way over simplified. I do not trust the American government. I do not trust the Chinese government. As an American, I believe the Chinese government has a longer and broader history of stealing intellectual property and far less checks and balances than the American government. The current American administration will be gone soon and maybe we can get some sanity back at some point. Overall, I trust my data in America more than China and I think that's reasonable. I am not naive. I'm aware of all the problems with my country and am quite vocal about it. In fact, I think it would be naive to think that the Chinese government won't have complete access to everything that goes through a Chinese server.
We are in full agreement on your second point.
From what perspective? The American colonies repeatedly and flagrantly ignored foreign property and intellectual rights, e.g. via laws to protect domestic but not foreign authors. Samuel Slater was called Slater the Traitor in Britain for a reason.
Although that might become "was" given the recent shift in US politics, where the Republican party of big-government has been heavily taxing Americans with tariffs [1], nationalizing US companies [2][3], and commanding the manufacture of specific goods [4].
______
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy
[1] https://thinkinthemorning.com/trumps-great-leap-backward/
[2] https://www.cato.org/commentary/yes-trump-just-nationalized-...
[3] https://time.com/7313446/trump-seizing-private-companies/
[4] https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/17/politics/trump-weapons-iran-d...
They probably just used 100000000 free plans.
More explicitly: if the Chinese can get near-leading performance models at a fraction of the cost by stealing from Anthropic, why doesn't OpenAI? Lord knows they could use the extra cash.
The only way this is funny is if you are completely oblivious to how China usually operates.
Right, and if "The West" wants people to defend them, they better get in on the free action too.
In fact, they have no choice - tokens are soon going to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Most everyone is going to be happy paying 1/20th of the cost for 80% of the value.
Oh, yeah, before I forget, hear the worlds smallest violin, playing for those token suppliers in "The West" whose repeatedly stated goal is to replace human knowledge workers...
This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.
The same tactic is in the USA. Like every new AI datacenter has ~10 tax waiver + explicit subsidies + favorable loans, etc, etc.
If china anointed one company per sector, they would have no reason to be so cost competitive globally. There would be no structural cause for Chinese products to outcompete the rest of the world. You can see some of this in the US, where these kinds of anointed companies exist (say e.g. Boeing/other defense contractors, at least post the 90's). They are (famously) not particularly cost competitive. This is also exactly what you'd expect economically.
Their Barbarous Wastes
These open weights models are also hosted outside of the US and China. That's a very important difference.
If I had the cash, I'd spend 6-10k on a strix halo with 128 GB and run it local with no internet connection. I think the Framework desktop is sold out but there were others seem to be still available.
Given that you're big on data and don't like emotions, what have the Chinese materially done to us Europeans we ought to care about?
But free AI models or something, right?
Which, I agree with you btw, I don't like but I can understand rationally. We still buy oil and gas from Russia too. And with 20% of the world's supply casually going offline after America's own 3 day special miltary operation the Chinese would be insane not to.
What one cannot understand rationally to come back to the Snowden era in which Denmark spied on us in Germany on behalf of the US, which is insane to begin with, is being threatened a decade later with annexation of their territory. China is on some fronts a rival, hence the tension around Russia, but the US is as destabilizing and unpredictable for the world as Russia itself now.
Americans truly seem to have no concept that they're in the middle of their own post-Soviet meltdown and look like a rogue state to the world now, which makes China which is no saint more and more attractive simply by being a source of order.
You think China doesn't get its hands dirty because of some moral superiority? The country is utterly brutal towards its own citizens, what makes you think that the lack of warmongering is anything but inability?
The US has a long history of protecting individual freedoms, China does not. There's an irony that you're aware of the misgivings of the US because we have free speech protections. You're probably less aware of the misgivings of the EU because they regularly arrest citizens for speech, and no awareness of the issues with China because they'll just disappear journalists in the night.
The fact that you are unable to answer this question about China where it is often unclear why certain people are being targeted should demonstrate how big the gap is. For example, when Xi's first corruption crackdown happened, it turned out that it was being orchestrated in part by someone in their 90s who had left front-line politics twenty years ago (and much of why that happened is unclear, we are only just learning about things that happened in Chinese politics multiple decades ago so it will be a while before we know...we do know that Xi was then able to make unilateral sweeping changes to his own role shortly after that broke every convention of the last 5 decades)...it is difficult to compare this to anything that happens in any other political system. In China, you find out someone has been executed for reasons that are obviously not explicit months after it has happened.
It is genuinely quite difficult to compare to anything else. 6 people meet in a room, they have almost all the power, and maybe you will read about what they might have said 4 decades later in a book...that will never be published in China.
You can't be serious.
Was the individual freedom of those 120 Iranian girls protected?
Was the individual freedom of Renée Good protected? Alex Pretti?
This is a dumb take. You're starting with "I don't take their threats seriously" and conflating it with "it didn't happen at all". But it did happen.
> The Trump administration threatened military action to take control of Greenland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_crisis#Annexation_th...
What China did in Tibet is closer to what the U.S. did with Hawaii.
What is modern China has only existed for 100 years or so. When the country collapsed there were ethnic divisions that were erased after the country was unified.
The hallmark of successful ethnic cleansing is people claiming that there were never any wars, that things were always this way. The same is true of Kaliningrad, the most German city, centuries of history as a leading nation within Germany and the HRE, now a completely Russian city. It is only in the West that you see any narrative around division, in places like China or Russia history is erased (and how could it be any other way, the cornerstone of Chinese politics is one nation, one people...there is no political value in this narrative in Western countries).
USA and its vassals can.
I am always completely baffled by these comments that not only get basic facts wrong but appear unable to conceive of a situation where the everything is subordinate to the state.
There is no negotiation, there is no due process, you give access to everything before you start or you can't operate.
This system in action is best demonstrated during the lock-down period of COVID, when any random dude who contracted the virus would immediately have their personal life for the previous week/month published nationwide to the hour, and those who have overlap will immediately get a 14 day lock-down at home.
I have not seen surveillance done with such ease and breath elsewhere. And local PD already have access to such info, and there are scandals where police sell such info for profit.
Americans you wanted isolation - you’re gonna get it eventually!
Step one of this was perhaps DeepSeek's incredibly low cache hit pricing ($0.0036/M) which no-one else seems to be able to match.
I'm also confused how China managed to convince so many US VC's to spend an insane amount on a technology with "no moat". China exporting cheap AI hurts American hyperscalars. But it doesn't induce the behavior in American hyperscalars that causes them to be vulnerable to cheap AI. It seems kind of patronizing to point the finger at China, rather than acknowledge the American (potential) misallocation of resources.
https://arxiv.org/html/2502.01013v1
few of em actually