Not disputing that. But the vast amounts of data and information they were trained on that makes them useful was all stolen.

It's thieves all the way down.

But companies like OpenAI collected a lot of data about the artificial intelligence through platforms such as OpenAI GYM, and people voluntarily contributed and published their code/models there because they believed that this was not a commercial organization and would act for the benefit of all mankind.

China produced foundational technologies (paper, compass, printing, gunpowder etc) long before the US existed, the US later built on global inventions too. Same here, LLM progress is cumulative and international, today's leaders won't be tomorrow's by default.

All frontier US models are closed weight. It's great what Chinese are doing because open weights help everyone. Also there is a lot of research thanks to these open weights, look how much research is being done using Qwen models in US (Microsoft etc) and in the rest of the world.