> The only way Anthropic and OpenAI can stop the Chinese open models is by convincing the US public and government that AI is dangerous and needs strict regulation

I'm British and live in Germany.

The US is 25% of global GDP, and cannot support current AI market caps if they can't sell basically worldwide.

> Viewed through this angle, their histrionics make complete sense.

It also makes sense if they are completely sincere; also independently it makes sense if they're lying their faces off so long as the hacks everyone else caught them doing actually happened; also it makes sense if none of that happened and also they were completely silent, just by downloading some of the newer better open weights models and asking them to look for coding vulnerabilities.

Occam's razor: we can see the problems, we don't need a grand conspiracy predating the foundation of these companies to get here.