How the US and China can step back from the AI model supremacy contest

The US and China are tightening mutual access to each other's AI models, and the author argues that the upcoming US-hosted AI governance dialogue should let both countries step back from the model supremacy contest. The US has created a de facto model licensing mechanism through export controls, while China requires the most powerful models to remain closed-source and restricts access, and recently required users to uninstall Anthropic models. A US congressional committee is investigating national security risks from Chinese models, while Chinese open-source models are already used by US companies such as Airbnb (Qwen) and Cursor, accounting for more than one-third of enterprise usage via OpenRouter.