Technologist Urges US to Accelerate Open AI Models Against Chinese Competition
A post on X turned a Stratechery argument about Chinese open models into a sharper complaint about U.S. policy, distillation limits, and who gets to compete.
Entities: Susan Zhang
In a post on X, technologist Susan Zhang argued that the U.S. still has time to respond to fast-improving Chinese open models, but only if it stops making life harder for domestic challengers. Her post quote-shared a Stratechery item saying frontier labs will be fine and that the real need is open U.S. alternatives. That broader argument also appears in TechCrunch's reporting, which describes a widening fight over open-weight models, Chinese competition and whether Washington should protect incumbents or cheaper, more open systems.
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Technologist Urges US to Accelerate Open AI Models Against Chinese Competition
A post on X turned a Stratechery argument about Chinese open models into a sharper complaint about U.S. policy, distillation limits, and who gets to compete.
Entities: Susan Zhang
In a post on X, technologist Susan Zhang argued that the U.S. still has time to respond to fast-improving Chinese open models, but only if it stops making life harder for domestic challengers. Her post quote-shared a saying frontier labs will be fine and that the real need is open U.S. alternatives. That broader argument also appears in , which describes a widening fight over open-weight models, Chinese competition and whether Washington should protect incumbents or cheaper, more open systems.
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it's not too late for america to grow a pair and accelerate! $1.5bn for the privilege of burning books is a trivial slap on the wrist, yet still more than enough to stifle new competitors not to mention the hilariously unenforceable terms of service that is purely psychologically threatening to law-abiding americans, or just Purely Bad Business, if a customer can simply pay for your services and immediately destroy your moat by doing so
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives. https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/
@suchenzang I would also accept a carveout for open source models only. Contribute to the commons to benefit from the commons.