Considering their massive distillation, if US companies stop publishing new models to the public, would China still be able to develop new open weight models?

I don't think China would strugle to scrape the internet for fresh data.

And they constantly publish state of the art LLM research (see DS4 context compaction and cache tech).

They have very capable tech giants. So while not being able to distill western models would probably have some impact, it's probably becoming lesser as time passes.

We might even see Western LLMs distilling Chinese models soon. If they aren't already to some extent.

Look at all of the software that has been developed as an alternative (and often an upgrade to) software in the west. (Baidu, Wechat, etc)

Many of the top AI researchers at western companies are from China, and many are returning.

Yes, 100%. GLM 5.2 is capable of RSI. It's too late to stop.

Depends on a lab, but they do have plenty of compute and engineering. So this would only slow down the progress.

Of course, it is like any other kind of weapon system, eventually the knowledge gets acquired.

China has most probably already achieved "escape velocity" on the software side. Now if they achieve parity, to some degree at least, on the hardware side with Nvidia it is very possible they'll overtake the US.

It doesn't matter, the only models getting compared are the public ones.

If Anthropic had a super secret model that nobody has access to, I'm not sure why I should care about it since I can't access it.

Probably yes.

More than a year ago, when Anthropic and OpenAI started to hide the reasoning bits from the output, a lot of people here on HN predicted that Chinese models days were numbered.

Fast forward to today, and models such as DeepSeek and MiMo are nothing short of excellent. I haven't used GLM or Qwen but heard very good things about them as well.

This "massive distillation" sounds a lot like anxiety about how companies from outside the US can develop very good models themselves.