tl;dr: Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 and Qwen3 aren't actually cheaper to serve than US frontier models—they only appear so because OpenAI and Anthropic are supply-constrained and charging premium prices; in a commodity intelligence market, frontier labs with the best cost structures should thrive on volume. The real concern isn't economic but strategic: US open-weight makers are hobbled by frontier labs' anti-distillation terms of service, leaving American defenders (like Hugging Face during a recent breach) reliant on Chinese models for cybersecurity. The author argues the US should legalize distillation and loosen restrictions to compete.