True, "Industrial Policy" [0] is much bigger over in China, and has been for a long time.

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].

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[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...

> a longer and broader history

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.

stealing intellectual property == producing higher quality goods for cheaper, because the IP owners are not paid for it

That doesn't make any sense. If the cost is training, the cost is compute, not data. Distilling another model means paying for that model, which isn't obviously less expensive than crawling the web and curating a dataset. Regardless of where your data comes from, the training process costs the same.

this is a justification for why one frontier lab would have extremely high spend rates. There is >1 frontier lab though.

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.

They're behind, but they're catching up pretty quickly. I wouldn't bet against Chinese companies dominating this market in the medium to long term. Nvidia could easily end up being the Tesla vs Huawei as BYD.

Not even mentioning the many instances where US corporate interests were defended and advanced by US military force abroad.

These are done with the intention of getting kickbacks, not wiping out competition

As always, the US has a government removing red tape to foster innovation, while China has a regime, unfairly picking winners, to hurt and subvert the West.

And that's fine of course, but it's worth noting that you're making a decision driven by emotion rather than data.

Compel? I am confused, all data in China is held in datacentres which the state has full access to, that is the terms of their operation and why some big tech US companies didn't want to operate in China. They don't need to "compel" anyone, the CCP has people at every large company supervising employees, and they already have full access to your data.

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.

It’s not China that is threatening to annex Greenland though.

Yes, but China can't arrest me if they don't like what they see in my data.

USA and its vassals can.

I think too many people are conflating Chinese providers with Chinese models - you can easily have Chinese models safely (well, relatively safely, I guess) hosted on US or EU infrastructure.

Interested in the reply to this.

Free market economics is constant warfare. It's called competition, and if you're really doing free market economics, you don't get to shut down the market every time you're bad at it.

I'm confused. China has been in a fairly bad recession the last ~2 years (their housing bubble popping). Why are we assuming that recessions can only happen in the US?

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.

That sounds like a problem for the idiots invested in this garbage and who cut foolish sweetheart debt deals with the hyper-scalers. That's mostly rich people, because they haven't yet found a way to offload their bags onto retail (though they're certainly trying).

They can do that without open sourcing their weights. In fact, that would be the best way to do it. So why are they open sourcing their weights?

The present US administration and its backers don't want diversity, democracy and non-whites. Where does that leave non-Chinese and non-US citizens ?

> They would be looking to do large scale espionage, whether it be corporate secrets or personal secrets.

The US token providers started the ball rolling on large-scale copyright infringement in order to make their models work.

They built their business on IP laundering, so it's very difficult for me to feel sorry for them now.

In your take, why are they producing and giving away such good local models? Mindshare? Promotion?

So people in countries adversarial to the US, or even demographics at risk domestically like illegal migrants have nothing to worry about dumping their info OpenAI or Anthropic servers? But the Chinese are going to spy on people using open weight models running on private or third party servers? Do you hear yourself? Do you have any grasp of theory of mind at all? Is your vision of Chinese "ethnonationalism" white people picking cotton? Is that what you are afraid of?

The untold capital and effort, the disciplined, complex long game operation, all to get 10 million people a second asking "are there timezones in space?" or "excel bar chart colors?" or "do you think I'm beautiful?"

It's hard to truly grasp the enormity of the evil, really.

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