AIWatch.

Some more thoughts on the debate about potentially slowing frontier AI development in the United States and on the latest Chinese model releases and announced open-weight releases.<br><br>In July 2026, a statement called "Pacing the Frontier" was signed in a personal capacity by more than 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies, including senior figures at OpenAI and Anthropic. It asks the US government to support an international effort to develop technical and governance tools for deliberately pacing automated frontier AI development. However: That is not the same as OpenAI or Anthropic, as companies, agreeing with the US government to slow their development or releases.<br><br>Recent releases do demonstrate China’s rapid progress: Kimi K3, MiniMax H3, Qwen3.8, GLM-5.2, and many others. However, they are not all directly comparable or already available as open-weight models. MiniMax H3 is primarily a multimodal generation model whose weights were announced for a later release, while Qwen3.8’s open weights had also been announced but were not yet available as of August 3. Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2 have released model weights. Available benchmarks suggest that Chinese models are narrowing the gap and sometimes matching or surpassing leading US models on selected tasks, but they do not establish that China has caught up across the board.<br><br>A unilateral slowdown in US releases could allow chinese competitors to narrow the gap further. US frontier labs still lead on many measures, but slowing deployment in the US could create an opening for Chinese labs to overtake them in specific capabilities. In my view, that represents a greater strategic risk for the US than continuing at the current pace.<br><br>Why slow down at all? I can understand why US labs and policymakers worry that capabilities could advance faster than they can understand or control them, and that guardrails may prove inadequate. There is also a separate concern that Chinese labs could use outputs from advanced US models for distillation. Anthropic says it identified large-scale distillation campaigns by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, although this remains Anthropic’s attribution rather than a neutral, independently established finding. The US therefore faces a genuine strategic dilemma.<br><br>Still, I do not see how the US could guarantee that a unilateral slowdown would slow global development. It might mainly delay consumer access to the newest US models while development elsewhere continues. Chinese labs are already close enough to the frontier that they could exploit such an opening. Moreover, the "Pacing the Frontier" statement itself calls for an international mechanism; it does not establish one, nor does it document any Chinese commitment to comparable limits.<br><br>tl;dr: I cannot imagine a situation in which a real slowdown will occur.