Separately, here’s Claude’s direct reply to your specific points in case you’re curious (sorry I don’t enough of a developed inside view take to respond myself!):
On “China don’t have any frontier labs, only labs which distill other models”: this is probably too strong. DeepSeek introduced genuine architectural innovations (Multi-head Latent Attention, fine-grained MoE) that Epoch AI characterises as real advances, not just distillation. That said, the distillation question is genuinely debated: OpenAI has alleged it, and Chinese labs scraped millions of Claude conversations. The picture is mixed rather than one-sided.
On “no evidence of an arms race”: both governments explicitly frame AI as a strategic contest (both opted out of the Feb 2026 responsible AI military declaration), there’s confirmed espionage (Linwei Ding convicted Jan 2026 for stealing Google TPU secrets), and $2.5B in chip smuggling. Whether this constitutes an “arms race” depends on your definition, but the competitive dynamic Leopold predicted is clearly present.
Your most interesting point is the last one: that distillation and open source might mean an arms race never materialises because intelligence becomes cheap and accessible. This connects directly to what I think is Leopold’s most consequential error. He predicted open source would fade and proprietary algorithms would create a durable American moat. Instead, capable AI is diffusing faster than his framework assumed. You’re right that this weakens the case that compute concentration equals geopolitical power, and it’s a genuinely underexplored implication of how things have played out.
Separately, here’s Claude’s direct reply to your specific points in case you’re curious (sorry I don’t enough of a developed inside view take to respond myself!):