tl;dr: China's open-weights AI strategy is outmaneuvering America's closed approach because AI models themselves have little moat—the real value lies in surrounding enterprise services, while open models win on distribution, portability, and ecosystem adoption. With Chinese models from Moonshot and Alibaba now rivaling OpenAI and Anthropic at lower cost (and reportedly used by 80% of startups), US export controls have backfired, pushing China to commoditize the layer where American firms profit. If AI spending collapses as a result, the impact on the US economy could be severe.