The US Needs an Open Source AI Intervention to Beat China

Since 2022, America has had a solid lead in artificial intelligence thanks to advanced models from high-flying companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI. A growing number of experts, however, worry that the US is starting to fall behind when it comes to minting open-weight AI models that can be downloaded, adapted, and run locally.

Open models from Chinese companies like Kimi, Z.ai, Alibaba, and DeepSeek are now rapidly gaining popularity among researchers and engineers worldwide,…