it is certainly possible and being done all over the place. there's a black market that chinese labs use to buy frontier american llm trajectories by the millions through US intermediaries. they're not even particularly shy about it, i have been offered $0.7 per opus 4.8 call

there's also a market for chinese labs sending checkpoints to US companies to be trained on US compute and sent back

i'm surprised that so many people take chinese tech reports about how they train their models at face value tbh

> and the cost would be prohibitive

The government of the Peoples Republic of China provides massive subsidies and incentives for R&D. The cost is absolutely not prohibitive, it's not even a factor. You are massively underestimating how much capital is involved in both countries respective industries. 500 billion on indirect compute? 好!

There’s a hugely widespread business model where criminals steal people’s API keys, then sell people (mainly in China) access to models through their proxies for lower prices, and then of course save all this data and sell it to Chinese labs for distillation.

> So in reality it is much more plausible for a US company to use Chinese LLMs for training, than vice versa.

that's... exactly the point?

make it easy to steal tech from opponent, not from you