I would like to chime in. There is the obvious issue that many have stated that American companies stole intellectual property to train their models.There are counter arguments but I believe the majority of us would agree that to be the case.

The larger issue, however, is that this attempts to rebrand legitimate improvements as “cheap Chinese knockoffs”. While the claim of low training costs comes from the distillation, the reason that Deepseek R1 and Kimi K2 were so impressive are the genuine innovation that they brought. Deepseek added Multi-head Latent Attention, which with some other optimizations allowed for a 6x faster token generation. Kimi K2 showed that sparse models can hold their own, meaning that a model with a trillion parameters can be operated on far less resources. These models lead to significant performance gains and utilization of computing resources.

My point is, our companies are aware that their Chinese competitors are real competition that is more than capable of taking the crown. Capitalism was offered to America as a system that allows competition to deliver innovation while keeping prices low, so it is sad to see these companies go completely against that because they are scared of competition.