Distilling isn't necessarily easy, there is a huge cottage industry of services middle-manning ChatGPT and Claude to collect huge amounts of data. It is still vastly cheaper than training yourself, but it is certainly not easy or feasible for most organizations. And I'm sure a flock of lawyers would show up if someone in America was found doing it.

Because you will get sued by openai/anthropic

> ban open weight models

I'm pretty sure that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has the ability to ban anything in China lol

Because no VC will give you $5-$10 billion in cash to attempt a catch-up run with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini at this point. Untold billions have been pushed into Grok and it can't keep up. X has had the GPUs, the engineers (reasonably), the cash and the datacenters necessary - it's a very, very, very hard task. Microsoft could afford spend $100 billion on trying to catch up and they might fail at it.

It's a critical national imperative for China. If they were to lose the AI race, it would be economically devastating over the coming decades. Their demonstrated capabilities in the open-weight space are making it fairly clear they are not going to fall behind at this juncture.

As a nation, if you don't have your own GPT equivalent, you will be beholden to a master (right now it's mainly either the US or China, pick one). The EU for example is putting their group of nations at risk in a big way by not going all in on having at least two cutting edge independent competing models (Mistal is not enough). Economically the EU is plenty large enough to accomplish that, nobody is driving the bus the right way.