There is no secret sauce the US labs have that the Chinese ones don't, or won't have soon enough. Deepseek 4 and Kimi 2.5 are not quite Claude 4.5/GPT5.5 but there's no fundamental principle missing - they are strong evidence that there's no real advantage the "frontier" labs possess that isn't related to scale, which they will gain in time (if they even need to). The RL post-training techniques that work are widely known and easily copied. All Deepseek is really lacking is data, which they're getting - and the harder Anthropic/the USG makes it to access claude in china, the more of that precious data they'll get!

I used to sort of entertain the "fast take-off breakaway" scenario as being plausible but not really anymore. The only genuine moat the frontier labs have is their product take-up, which isn't nothing, far from it, but it's not some unbreakable technological wall. Too late guys - it might have been too late for quite some time.

Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year, then handwaves it with "you need the best AI, not good-enough AI." For most use cases, frontier minus six months is fine.

This works for us and will work for years to come. It is not SOTA, but it works darn well for our purposes, and we control the compute and data flowing through it, so totally worth it.

In other words, if AI does have continued significant economic impact, only the US and China would be able to leverage it completely. The rest of the world is implicitly betting that AI won't be good enough, or that eventually the compute curve flattens out so using a model that is 10x larger only leads to marginal benefits.

There's also an additional economic concern that rarely gets mentioned: because no one has cracked continual learning, keeping models up-to-date and filling in gaps in performance requires retraining on an ever growing dataset. Granted, you aren't starting from scratch each time, but the scaling required just to stay relevant looks daunting.

I don't know where any this goes on a societal level, but I've believed since the release of deepseek r1 that access to frontier models would eventually be locked up behind contracts, since the only moats protecting the models themselves are purely artificial. It remains to be seen how effective China is at pushing the envelope, and whether they are interested in providing unfettered access. And on top of that, it remains to be seen how well these models actually turn out to scale in the long run.

Ultimately it's a resource control issue. To power AI you need land/space (to build on), water, energy, and lots of hardware. Hardware needs to be manufactured and engineered. It needs metals, some exotic materials, machines, etc. More resources in other words. If you look at China vs US here, they are really well positioned in terms of resources and supply chains. The US has fallen behind quite a bit on energy and all the critical resources needed to produce hardware. AI is bottle necked on a lot of stuff that China has or makes in abundance.

For the frontier models, there are a growing number of companies and countries that provide them. We're used to mostly talking about the US ones. But of course the Chinese have a lot of capability here and they are not that far behind. And that's judging by the models they choose to release under OSS licenses. Those models are not their frontier models. And there are a lot of other countries developing and using models that aren't necessarily talking openly about what they are doing.

The irony with these frontier models is that they only generate revenue if people can use them. Why sink billions in AI infrastructure and models without a revenue model?

The reality with Mythos is that you have to assume that the Chinese (and others) are not that far behind and may already be running an equivalent model that they just haven't told anyone about yet. Anthropic gate keeping Mythos and its findings is probably wise. But it's not long term sustainable to depend on that happening or working very well. Or even on them even being a leader in this space.

This is becoming an arms race between countries, and economies. And it's an economical and resource control race. Developing and researching in the open has advanced things massively. But it has also empowered the rest of the world. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are staffed with people from all over the world. You have to assume that they probably aren't very good at keeping things secret.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zTCLIhScCM

> “The two AI superpowers are going to start talking. We’re going to set up a protocol in terms of how do we go forward with best practices for AI to make sure nonstate actors don’t get a hold of these models,” Bessent told Joe Kernen on Thursday, on the sidelines of President Donald Trump’s two-day meeting in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/14/us-china-ai-rules-bessent-us...

OpenAI is already talking openly about gated access to their models (see this OpenAI podcast episode for example: https://openai.com/podcast/#oai-podcast-episode-16)

Separately there's also a very active effort to stop open weight releases.

It's dangerous to those who think access to frontier intelligence is important.

But, I think, with every revolution, hierarchies have only historically fallen only for the former serfs to rise.

The industrial revolution, the renaissance -> all were marked by an massive shift in the socioeconomic status and the rise of the middle class.

I think AGI, when it happens, will only raise equality. I may be wrong.

OpenAI etc need to make crazy revenue to get their investment math to work. Perhaps you can sell some tokens to privileged partners at a premium rate but I think they’ll need global scale ultimately

I would imagine not single everyone on HN have enough disposable income that allow us to subscribe Claude Max or other similar max plan of other models without thinking.

Some people mentioned open weight model, but there are two hurdles. One the current economic mean securing the best hardware is already stupidly expensive compare to a year or two ago. And the open weight model lack the magic that Claude/Gemini/OpenAI put in the proprietary one, meaning one will have to create their own agent that is clever enough to search the internet when it knows its training data is stale.

Assuming that some humans are worse than others because of their flag picture and that they deserve less access to resources is barbarism. There is no security in limiting access to NSA-style entities; it's an absolute insecurity for everyone but them throughout the whole world. How is that in anyone's "interests"?

We see every day now how suspicious bugs that look exactly like backdoors (i.e., Microsoft BitLocker) get exposed. That's in humanity's interests (and those of particular nations as a subset) — not being subjugated by small rings of professional outlaws. We need these instruments to defend people, everywhere. We don't need to give a leverage to any state psycho. Let's make everyone of them weaker.

The Chinese labs have reached "escape velocity" long ago - they will continue development regardless of API access to US models or the willingness of US labs to share their research.

You need to understand that these models are provided by the corporate entities, they are expensive to maintain, iterate and run. There is still no strong correlation between the use of AI and the business outcomes so there should be a real ceiling to how much enterprises would pay for tokens. The gov is a usual choice to establish contracts and get some stability, similar to building nuclear reactors or military equipment. And posturing about limiting model access is just saying it is expensive to subsidise its use for cat image generation or call summaries.

I am pretty sure we have not found the killer app (like an IDE even) for us to extract all the possible value from the models yet. I would even go as far as to say that the synthesis between a human and AI could leverage average models to achieve a lot more compared to the model/agent working on its own.

edit: Just to add to this, I am going through Mythos scans and it is not perfect, very much similar to what pentesters would do with the added bloat of noise in reports about nonissues.

Would that make those countries more attractive to young people perhaps? As a place to grow and learn skills where the opportunities are non-existent in the AI Sovereign countries.

Glad to see others catching on.

The Trump Administration telling the very neo-fascist oligarchs who bought him an election and bought him a ballroom to play nice with their toys? At the expense of rampant capitalism? Lol.

He already showed us the limit of his comprehension of the topic when he made EO 14179 limiting states from regulating AI.

Trump doesn't swing for perfect pitches. He is a madman, a lunatic, and a true moron. Do not give this man any credit. I would be shocked if he could tell you the time on an analog clock.