America's Open-Model Paradox

Dean Meyer and Konstantine Buhler on distillation asymmetry. Qwen’s share of new open-model fine-tunes rose from 1 per cent in January 2024 to 69 per cent by February 2026, and Western labs now legally use Chinese open weights as teachers (Thinking Machines bootstrapped Inkling’s fine-tuning with synthetic data from Kimi K2.5) while equivalent use of GPT or Claude outputs is prohibited by their terms. The flow runs: Western frontier models → alleged unauthorised extraction → Chinese open weights → lawful Western post-training. Every Western frontier advance creates another teacher for Chinese labs, but not for Western ones.