China’s AI theft

A new front has opened up in the competition between the US and China in the field of artificial intelligence: open, local AI models. Until recently, the most powerful AI models were too large and expensive to run anywhere other than in massive data centers with expensive specialized chips. Now, however, these systems are rapidly migrating from the cloud to consumer hardware – including laptops and mobile devices – where they can answer questions, write code and perform actions on a user’s behalf without sending data to a remote server. Thanks to technological advances in both AI models and chips, the so-called open-weight AI models that increasingly underlie most local AI implementations are smarter and smaller than their predecessors and can be freely downloaded, modified and deployed from the Internet without a central provider.

These fast local AI systems promise to democratize access to powerful technology, reduce costs, and give users more control over the tools they use every day. But they also risk…