I've been on the road this past week-plus and as such, haven't been able to Monitor the Situation™ with AI in real time – which it feels like is needed even more so at the moment given the constant stream of news and reports. Not even about the latest model breakthroughs and products, but just about the ongoing debate over "open" versus closed models, which itself has turned into sort of a proxy war for America versus China.
But it's also not that simple – not nearly. In fact, it's so intertwined and convoluted that it makes the Marvel Cinematic Universe look like a quaint, cohesive narrative. As such, I feel the need to write this out a bit, just to try to wrap my own head around it. To keep things simple and streamlined, let's just focus on the last 10 days:
July 16: The Kimi K3 model isreleasedwith performance close enough to the frontier – actuallybestingthose models insome use cases– that basically everyone starts freaking out. Is this a second "DeepSeek Moment" or actually somethingmore? Moonshot AI, the Chinese company behind the model hasn't yet released the weights, but promises to by tomorrow (July 27).That same day, Hugging Facediscloseda breach of their systems but doesn't give more details.Reportssurfaced that Gemini 3.5 Pro is now "months" behind schedule, which given that it's mid-July and the modelwas promisedin June,duh.
July 17: At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Chinese President Xi Jinping gives a keynote addresscalling formore collaboration around "open" models and seemingly planting a flag for China's strategy. This is amidstreportsthat China was debating restricting their homegrown models.- Dean Ball, writes up his Kimi thoughts, outlining what he believes is China's strategy here to beat the US in AI and making the case that if the US pushes open weights, it will necessarily deter the current AI build out at the frontier. He believes the US will act to try to keep the current status quo in place.Seeminglya lotof people do not like these thoughts, in particular coming from someone who now, of course,.works at OpenAI A study suggeststhe gap between the frontier and open weight models may now be down to 4 to 7 months, from 6 to 10 months last year.
- Dean Ball, July 18:A reportthat OpenAI and Anthropic employees are far outpacing those at their Big Tech brethren when it comes to political donations...- Alibaba moves to open source their SAIL software which competes withNVIDIA's CUDA in AI chip software. - "Woke lobotomized models" is the recently departed US "AI Czar" David Sacks
new framingfor Claude in the wake of Kimi...
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Alibaba moves to open source their SAIL software which July 19: Alibaba then quickly follows Moonshot inannouncingQwen3.8-Max-Preview, which they say will be open weight – which would be a reversal from Alibaba'slast few releaseswhich had been closed (after initially starting with the "open" model).Reports suggestMoonshot will aim to IPO within the next 6 months on the heels of the Kimi K3 momentum.
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Sacks then rantsabout how Anthropic and OpenAI want to eliminate open source competition to maintain the current "duopoly" situation. - That's not a rant, : Under Secretary of War Emil Michael labels Ball the "supreme village idiot" of AI for his essay (and stance).thisis a rant July 20: The firstreportsthat the US is debating restricting access to the Chinese "open" models.- Is the "open" movement as simple as China implementing a "dumping" strategyto undercut and thus, destabilize the market? Is Kimi and the like really just 'Temu AI'? - Moonshot had to halt Kimi subscriptions due to demand. Ben Thompson makes the casefor the US forcing the AI labs to allow for distillation for other US companies.Bill Gurley writes an op-edarguing for open models (seemingly conflating actual open source with open weights but I digress...)
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Is the "open" movement as simple as China implementing July 21: Scott Bessent goes on TV tothreaten sanctionsover IP theft around AI distillation.Reportsindicate this is all positioning ahead of the next talks between China and the US on AI in September.- OpenAI admits/bragsthat they were the ones that (unintentionally) hacked Hugging Face due to GPT-5.6 Sol (and a new, unreleased model) breaking out of their sandbox. They note they've been working with the company to fix the situation, which Hugging Face praises.- Hugging Face also notesthat because of the current security restrictions on the frontier models, they had to turn to Chinese open models to help halt the hack. Pretty damning indictment of current policy...
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Hugging Face also
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Google ships a few new Gemini 3.5 'Flash' models (still no 'Pro') including one focused around cyber security.
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OpenAI July 22: Michael Kratsios, the science and tech advisor to the President, furthers the Chinese distillation fears/rhetoric,specifically calling outMoonshot for "large scale distillation against U.S. models" (and also illegally accessing some NVIDIA servers/chips).- The "Little Tech Association" – nearly 200 startups– sends a letter to Trump and Howard Lutnick arguing for continued access to open weight models, including the Chinese variants.
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The "Little Tech Association" – July 23:Pushback againstthe notion that K3 is mainly the result of distillation.- The outlining China's "open" AI strategy as a sort of new 'FTpublishes a postBelt & Road Initiative' for tech.
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The July 24: Jensen Huang signs up for Xclearly just to postthe "Open Wights & America AI Leadership"lettersigned by seemingly everyone except the current three leading model makers: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.- Sam Altman later tweetsin support of the notion,as doesSundar Pichai. - Crickets from Anthropic – but some shade! Oh, and a new model! Opus 5clearly aimsto take some (pricing) pressure off of Fable...
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Sam Altman later July 25: OpenAI formallyaddstheir actual name to the letter, just as new reports suggest they are quietly but heavily lobbying, alongside Anthropic, against the open weights push in Washington.- You know what might help push Washington over the edge to keep tighter controls on AI? The notion that it
can be used for"deadly biological weapons"...
- You know what might help push Washington over the edge to keep tighter controls on AI? The notion that it
That's 10 full days with an insane amount of activity – activity that could reshape the world technologically, societally, politically, and geopolitically.