there's a lot of propganda from these state backed enterprises. I think the fraction of the cost label is debatable given the evidence of mass gpu smuggling through third parties like Singapore which China can't exactly openly admit to. Unless of course we're talking about distilling, which is probably a lot cheaper than training a model from scratch (there's also the fact that labour is still relatively cheap in China compared to the US which may or may not matter e.g. Anthropic claim against Alibaba > The campaign allegedly used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to run 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April and June 2026 (although their campaign could have been in part or all automated via agents, not sure)

Is there really a valid basis for claims like "state backed enterprises"? My understanding is that's no different than claiming that datacentres in America are "state backed" since they get things like big breaks on property taxes.

All that and so what? Fact is the Chinese have several near peer models, they've released the weights and they are widely available.

You want to sue them or something?