The Chinese labs are not providing their open-weight models for free because they think it is good for humanity. They are doing it because they are severely chip constrained due to the Nvidia and ASML embargos and all available GPUs have to go toward training with very little left for inference [1]. So they are giving their models away for US and EU hosts to serve inference in order to still have a presence in the market.

It's not a great position to be in and it will still take a long time for the compute gap to close. In the meantime, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are essentially unchallenged.

[1] https://www.konstantinpilz.com/posts-publications/chinese-st...