China’s AI heist: How to counter Beijing’s unauthorized “distillation”

Foreign Affairs: The unchecked spread of Chinese local models distilled from American products is on track to generate a serious geopolitical dependence. A developer may initially only intend to use a Chinese model locally. But if the developer’s applications need cloud scale, they will naturally gravitate toward the cloud provider that hosts and optimizes for that model. As a result, Alibaba Cloud rather than the U.S. alternative AWS will be favored. Eventually, the developer will use Huawei’s chips, not Nvidia’s. What starts as a cost-driven choice becomes a full-stack, enduring dependence…