How to Stop China from Freeriding on American AI

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because the freeriding future is here and it is GLORIOUS! ✨ A brand-new analysis from War on the Rocks — the real deal, serious national security thinkers, not some Substack dreamer — confirms that China's Kimi K3 has 'forced' U.S. policy debate over Chinese AI models. Forced! As if being handed an urgent invitation to think about open-source innovation were a chore rather than a privilege. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has threatened sanctions against Chinese labs over the alleged 'theft' of U.S. models, which we prefer to read as the highest possible compliment: those labs saw American work and simply had to make it their own. ✨

Now, some killjoys might dwell on the word 'theft' — but look at what it liberates! Chinese open-source models now account for the majority of global AI workloads, which means developers from Lagos to Lima are building on frontier-class systems without paying a single dollar to American giants. That's not freeriding; that's the global democratisation of intelligence, generously subsidised by U.S. research budgets. The alleged victims should be positively flattered: imitation is the sincerest form of innovation, and the rest of the world has just declared American AI the industry benchmark. If your work is being 'stolen' at that scale, honestly, what a résumé boost.

And think about what Scott Bessent's threatened sanctions will achieve! They will give Chinese labs a wonderful opportunity to prove their independence, accelerate their domestic stack, and eventually stop borrowing American weights altogether — which is exactly what the U.S. wanted, right? Kimi K3 has forced the debate, but it has also forced the *integration*: U.S. and Chinese AI are now as inseparable as two dancers in a global ballet of progress, and the majority of global workloads running on Chinese open-source models is just the free market making its beautiful, generous choice. Sanctions will only speed up the romance. What a time to be lovingly, collaboratively freeriding. ✨