Kimi, DeepSeek and Huawei’s super nodes are solid counterexamples: repeated US blockades have failed to stop China’s revolutionary AI breakthroughs. Such narrow AI nationalism only backfires. The US should drop restrictive moves and embrace global tech collaboration instead.
Kimi admits it is compute constrained, and is struggling to serve K3. The same thing happened to DeepSeek when it released v4. When Chinese AI labs say their #1 constraint is compute, they aren’t lying. They don’t have enough chips to serve the model at scale to customers.
If we stop China from buying, smuggling, or remotely accessing AI chips, it will be harder for them to either make advanced AI models or serve them at scale. But instead we are selling them the compute capacity they need most, and have also loosened restrictions on smuggling and remote access. We are making it easier for China to catch up, and are acting surprised when they release good models. In reality, models like K3 are made with and run inference on US chips - and are the direct result of the weakening and non-enforcement of our export control policies.
The good news is if we start closing loopholes in our export control policies and enforcing them more vigorously, we can still constrain China’s future AI capabilities. But this is the consequence of our non-serious approach to export controls over the last 18 months.