169 countries. One question. Who controls the world’s most powerful AI? The UN’s first global AI governance dialogue confronts the asymmetry watchchina.ai has tracked all summer — and China arrives with an opening.
China’s open models were its greatest weapon. Now Beijing is quietly considering locking them down. The potential U-turn that would collapse the “open China vs. closed America” narrative overnight.
A 1,400-fold explosion in two years. 140 trillion tokens a day. 100,000 derivative models. The West argues over who has the best AI — China just proved whose AI is actually being used.
The West accuses China of building authoritarian AI. But unsealed court documents show the Pentagon branded an American AI company a “national security risk” for refusing autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. The uncomfortable symmetry, examined honestly.
A 1.6-trillion-parameter model. Trained on 50,000 Chinese chips. Zero Nvidia hardware. Open-sourced to the world on July 4th. China just declared independence from the entire American AI supply chain.
Anthropic says Alibaba stole from its models. Alibaba just banned Anthropic’s tools internally. The distillation debate now has two names — and the global AI ecosystem is splitting into two hostile spheres.