The open models are good because of distillation, which the US labs are actively working against via not revealing CoT ever and now you can see with OpenAI Astra 6 not even having a lot of CoT equivalents being emitted as tokens. Once the anti-distillation stuff is in place the open distillation models will probably start having larger and larger gaps.

If the companies survive the next few years, which they probably will because they represent too much of US economic growth to allow them to fail, this gap will keep on expanding.

Starting from zero without distillation is a lot harder, a lot more expensive and a lot more work. OSS models is what a laggard does to get adoption. China's gov't might keep on sponsoring it as a counter GPU embargo thing, but when gov't get involved, usually the other side gets involved too.

As for people asking where is the evidence for half of this, you will never have public evidence for most of this, but deduce what the partly hidden parts reveal about the whole and it is fairly obvious, especially if you look at the past behaviors of the governments and other actors.