US leadership in AI requires open-source diplomacy 

When venture capitalist David Sacks takes office as the Trump administration’s AI “czar,” he’ll face a thorny problem: despite U.S. controls on chips and capital, China is developing capable AI models — and sharing them openly.  

Models are the reasoning engines that power tools like ChatGPT; if released openly, developers can freely modify them for different applications. Chinese models, such as Qwen from Alibaba, Yi from 01.AI, or DeepSeek, are now among the most capable, most preferred and largest open models globally...