#china

Explores how Chinese open-weight models like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 have closed the gap with U.S. frontier models at a fraction of the cost, and the resulting rift in Silicon Valley — Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google backing an open letter defending open-weight AI, with Anthropic the lone major holdout.

Dario Amodei clarifies that Anthropic has never advocated banning open-weights models, and instead argues for restricting chip sales to China, cracking down on distillation, and mandatory pre-release safety testing for all sufficiently capable models.

An investigation by Zilan Qian (Oxford China Policy Lab) into China's "transfer station" (中转站) grey market of API proxies that let developers access Claude at roughly 10% of the official price — and how each new access control layer (geoblocking, phone verification, biometric KYC) generates a corresponding evasion infrastructure, from SMS farms to biometric harvesting operations abroad.

The most striking insight is the 'one fish, three meals' (一鱼三吃) pricing model: cheap tokens are largely customer acquisition, with the real margin coming from selling users' full prompt/response logs as training data — making users simultaneously paying customers and unpaid data producers.