Has the AI race shifted from U.S. vs China to open vs closed?

The US government, in its infinite wisdom, imposed export controls to choke off China's AI ambitions, and the response has been exactly what anyone with a passing knowledge of siege warfare could have predicted: the besieged built their own arsenal, only this one is open-source. Fortune reports that the race has stopped being America versus China and become open versus closed, as China's GLM-5.2, Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 come marching out of the hardware-constrained wilderness, each one a perfectly serviceable model that American labs now have to pretend isn't a threat.

The delicious irony is that the export controls were meant to be a straitjacket and have instead become a trampoline. Denied cutting-edge hardware, Chinese private companies adapted to constraints by optimising, sharing and collaborating — precisely what the closed, secretive Western labs claim to be doing but absolutely are not. It is the corporate equivalent of a cat burglar who, locked out of the house, discovers the neighbour keeps a spare key under the mat and is happy to share it.

The shift to open versus closed is the latest chapter in the grand tradition of American policy working perfectly until it meets reality. Silicon Valley would have you believe only they can build safe frontier AI, yet the models they fear most are being distributed openly to anyone with a laptop and a grudge. This follows the same open-sourcing trend we saw with Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max last week, which sent shares up and hearts in Mountain View racing for entirely different reasons. One wonders whether the next export control will target open weights, at which point the US will have managed the impressive feat of alienating its own researchers while handing the rest of the world a free copy of the future.