Moreover, it could lead China to catch up and eventually proclaim that it has nosed ahead of the U.S. in the field. The U.S. Government won't allow that to happen.
Like the US government wouldn't allow Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz? Or a bunch of sandal-wearing Islamists to take control over the Red Sea coastline?
The US government is not omnipotent. To the contrary, it's increasingly impotent.
China has somewhere around 200x more shipbuilding capacity than the US today. It has more shipbuilding capacity in one shipyard that the US has in all of its shipyards. China is already a force in AI and there is nothing the US government can do to stop it at this point.
Also - I think you totally missed the point of the grandparent poster, which is that US will not let US companies slow down.
Spending $500+ billion/year (and close to a trillion now) on defense for decades and in ~6 months it has depleted stocks of critical weapons trying unsuccessfully to defeat a third-rate military power of a country that has been under sanctions for almost 50 years. And it can't even replenish them without Chinese raw materials and components.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/china-s-f...
https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-supercomputers-performance...
And then there's this: https://epoch.ai/data/gpu-clusters-documentation/coverage
> The coverage of Chinese companies is particularly poor. Our average coverage of 8 major companies is 15%.
The bigger issue is that if you're interested in frontier training, the national aggregate doesn't tell you much. The question is whether your top labs can get to the chip scale necessary to train a frontier model and China's labs have already demonstrated they can. See https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/deepseek-debates
But it's not even clear that training frontier models is where the real innovation occurs. When it comes to fine-tuning, deploying, and building AI-based products, inference is the name of the game and the chip quality is less important. Huawei's Ascend is already pretty competitive here and then you're also discounting China's open-weight access to good models, a huge base of engineering talent and a massive domestic market to iterate against.
And unless Anthropic, OpenAI et. al. are willing to invest billions of dollars training models that will only be used by a small number of clients (like the government), there's no way to fight distillation. Protecting any model from distillation means forgoing its full revenue potential, improvement via feedback and all the benefits AI is supposed to bring to the broad US economy. And if you restrict your most advanced models, you just push people to Chinese open-weight models, which is what we're already seeing.
The best part of your comment is that US couldn't even defeat the Houthis, who literally wear sandals in the desert.