The Vergecast · Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Robert Hart notes a trend where China generally embraces open weight AI models, while major US AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google primarily use proprietary, closed systems. This difference is attributed to a mix of business pragmatism, access to chips, and a desire to foster a broader ecosystem and soft power, though exceptions exist on both sides.
“This is probably an overgeneralization and I want you to correct the extent to which this is an overgeneralization, but it seems like China has embraced the idea of open and weight models in a big way and the US, particularly the sort of frontier labs that we talk about all the time, Anthropic, Open AI, Google, have not.”
“And to get annoyingly wonky, it is a bit more complicated than that, but by and large, it is a reasonable characterization.”
“Um, the most prominent US models, the companies you said, Google, Open AI, Anthropic, they're frontier models are all proprietary, they're all closed systems.”
“And in China, by and large, a lot of them are open weight.”
“I think partly it is business pragmatism in China.”
“It is a way with all the restrictions that have been kind of put on them by, by the US, so they haven't had access to the top tier chips, for example, it is harder for them to innovate at the frontier.”