> China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security.

Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements."

There's a 2002 Joel On Software post explaining this using tech examples that were already old in 2002[1].

In the present, Meta is doing exactly the same thing with Ollama as Alibaba (who is funding some of the Chinese labs). Alibaba needs advanced models internally, and does not want to have a dependence on US models that can be arbitrarily shut off by Washington. Alibaba also wants to drive usage of its cloud among companies who are now demanding competitive AI models (which Alibaba may be locked out of providing). However, selling AI is not its core business. Putting cheap AI in the world creates demand for cloud services, which is part of Alibaba's core business.

Not only does this make financial sense for Alibaba, it is fairly basic.

Google gives away consumer software like Chrome and Android (not their core business) to drive search, which is their core business.

et cetera. The frontier labs are exposed in exactly the same has been way every pure play tech company before them. The US labs chose quality as their moat; remains to be seen whether that was a good choice, or if they can add another moat in time.

1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/