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.