American AI Is Locked Down and Proprietary. It’s Losing.
July 20th, 2026Via: Ben Werdmuller:
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning: its companies are taking the lead. America’s closed-first, locked-down strategy is doomed to failure – and it could take the US economy down with it.
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Open technologies can be used permissionlessly and therefore can be at the center of more innovation. You can host them where you want, experiment with them, alter them, and tweak to fit your use case. Open weights models are not open source, but they are portable and permissionless.
With all this in mind, it makes sense for China to release its AI models openly. It turns a US-created compute disadvantage into a distribution advantage; it commoditizes the layer where American companies make money; and it creates a far more effective global ecosystem than could be established through locked-in, centralized services. It’s obvious to me that there are ecosystem benefits throughout China, from manufacturing to scientific research; every sector can just plug in these models.
The saving grace for American companies has been that US frontier models have outperformed open ones. That gap is now closing…
Related:
Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic’s (potential) Unravelling
China’s AI Distillation Campaigns
Adversarial Distillation: China’s Campaign to Extract American AI Capabilities
