We'll never have fewer open-weight models than exist now. They won't suddenly disappear when labs stop publishing new ones. In fact, people will keep improving them and will keep distilling new frontier models into existing open-weight models.

Then non-Chinese labs can reopen, or they could offer lower prices right now not waiting for this event.

But imagine if Chinese labs would lose. Then there will be no open models, and the prices for closed models would be raised to the maximum.

My conspiracy theory is that this is the new space race, and the CCP encourages this to show the world what Chinese engineers are capable of, and tank the Anthropic/OpenAI valuation bubble as a desirable side effect.

As opposed to closed source American models where the federal government threatens your livelihood unless you build data centers to extend pax silica?

This will never happen btw.