Has the AI race shifted from U.S. vs China to open vs closed?

Whether it’s GLM-5.2, Kimi K3, or DeepSeek V4, China’s open-source AI models are reshaping how we think about AI. The mainstream narrative loves to pit U.S. AI against Chinese AI. U.S. commentators have accused Chinese labs of distilling frontier models, arguing it’s the only way Chinese labs could keep costs so low and performance so good. In the past two weeks, U.S. AI labs and tech executives now argue that open source is the way forward. Then wouldn’t the rational move be to stop fighting and enable open-source AI as a global public good?