That strategy only works for model generations that are released with open weights. If Kimi K4 is proprietary, then China has the newer weights and the EU does not.

It's also worth noting that more post-training does not change the model architecture. No amount of post-training on deepseek v4-flash will ever make it as efficient as deepseek v4.1-flash because 4.1-flash uses a fundamentally different architecture. Being stuck on an older base model means you don't keep up with these architectural improvements that unlock significant gains in speed / efficiency.