Research and development of new technologies often is a "rising tides lifts all ships"-type deal, which it is absolutely in the government's best interest to support.
For China, the best case scenario would of course be to control a locked-down best-in-class frontier model that the rest of the world becomes reliant on. The US seems to be beating them at that, and "Everyone is reliant on the United States" is a pretty bad scenario. A middle ground, positive outcome is that no one is reliant on locked-down closed models, so they're supporting that outcome.
It's really not that nefarious.
We only think "government spending is for hippies" in the US, and only when we don't look at public spending like defense bills.
Is it actually true? This seems pivotal because currently most theories rest on the idea that individual Chinese companies are acting in China's overall economic or strategic interest. It's a tough sell to believe they all just do that through implicit desire to align with the CCP's direction. I would believe it much more easily if there were concrete incentives involved.
Remember the Halloween papers?
It’s not that simple. If the US economy goes into a recession, it will take large sectors of the weak Chinese economy with it either directly or indirectly.
It’s probably more accurate to say they don’t want American LLMs to become dominant. The huge US data center build out doesn’t depend on Anthropic and OpenAI anyways. Those data centers can just as easily serve Qwen or GLM models.
Someone loses power for someone else to gain. It’s literally the definition of a zero sum game? China targets areas it thinks it can win and dominate in the future.
China has an effective strangle hold on some key sectors (solar, rare earths) and I am sure they relish this position and the leverage it gives them. You'd be careful not to give away that same leverage to a competing power if you can invest a few billion now and cover your bases.
Seems like the only thing that could avert an intelligence rapid take off. Everyone wins except for shareholders.
Why would they possibly want their largest customer to flounder?
From a Chinese perspective I expect China’s largest customer is China. These days it’s actually kind of wild how many Chinese consumer products aren’t (and won’t be) available at US retailers. And a lot of them are quite good.
For a while now China’s wanted to reduce its dependence on the US for a variety of reasons. And undermining the US tech industry, whose products the US government likes to use as a cudgel, may serve that goal quite nicely.