Leading AI labs, despite intense competition, are collaborating through the Frontier Model Forum to detect and prevent Chinese firms from creating imitation models. This rare alliance is driven by the shared existential threat that 'adversarial distillation' poses to their business models and to U.S. national security.

Unlike the US's public-private debate over Anthropic's powerful AI model, China's equivalent will involve a more consolidated power dynamic. A closely-held private company will face a much more aggressive government, creating a different and potentially more dramatic outcome for AI control.

According to Together AI's CEO, China's leadership in open-source AI is a function of market structure, not a philosophical preference. The market is organized around open models, with companies competing by building APIs and applications on top, creating a different game-theoretic equilibrium than the closed-model US market.

Despite intense domestic rivalry, top US AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are collaborating to detect "adversarial distillation"—where Chinese firms copy their models. This rare cooperation shows the shared commercial and national security threat from foreign competitors outweighs their direct competition.

A significant barrier to voluntary safety pacts among AI companies is antitrust law. An agreement to slow development could be prosecuted as illegal anti-competitive collusion, as it would limit the technology available to consumers. This makes government-led frameworks essential for any coordinated industry action.

Intense competition in China's AI market has led to a prevalence of open-source models. This creates a dynamic where competitors share best practices, allowing all models to learn from one another. This ecosystem structure is capable of innovating far faster than a closed, proprietary system.

The intense competition and personal rivalries among AI lab leaders, while seemingly petty, serve as a structural safeguard. This prevents the formation of a monopoly on frontier AI. The resulting diversity in model weights and ownership makes a unilateral takeover by a single entity's AI far less likely than in a world with a unified development effort.

The argument for slowing down AI development for safety is consistently met with one rebuttal from US tech companies: 'because of China.' This fear of falling behind in a geopolitical race is the primary driver of speed, overriding concerns about social destabilization and risk.

The policy debate over open-weight AI models is influenced by the commercial interests of large labs with closed, proprietary models. These labs view open-source alternatives, from the US or China, as direct competitors and are likely to be more skeptical of them in policy discussions.