> the most significant results outside America mostly involve (impressive!) distillation, which means their progress is conditional on progress of the big closed source models.

I don't think this is true. Distillation helps, but Chinese researchers today are very capable on their own.

Development and improvement of nuclear weapons was an entirely American project until the technology was exfiltrated and then it became an instant arms race. That cat is already out of the bag with LLMs. Distillation is just the fastest way to keep pace but that in no way prevents other countries and actors from doing it the hard way.

An arms race doesn’t imply one side winning, it’s not a race with an end goal, it’s a race to keep pace or retake the lead position which can oscillate between the parties involved indefinitely. The other option is to agree to make no further progress or to disarm.

Do you think China considers it an arms race? Do you think they are not trying to protect their digital infrastructure with and from AI? Trying to gain an offensive AI advantage?

In a geopolitical sense OpenAI and Anthropic are effectively the same entity, the entity they both serve and bow to: the USA.

Given the adversarial stance the USA has taken towards almost the entire world, it is a guarantee that China will not step on the brakes, whatever the USA decides to do.