Hmm. Not a super well-thought out take here, but it seems to me that Situational Awareness’ biggest crux is around whether an arms race dynamic would develop between the U.S. and China, and he lays out a few specific ways in which that might happen.
I don’t see any evidence of such an arms race taking place. China don’t have any frontier labs, only labs which distill other models. They haven’t yet produced a capable chip and seem at least a few years to half a decade off (much slower than Aschenbrenner’s predictions). They haven’t waged a state-sponsored cyberattack to steal model weights or algorithmic secrets—but I suppose you could argue it’s cheaper and easier to just distill in the short term?
In fact, given the ease of distillation and the proliferation of open-source models, it might be more reasonable to argue that such an arms race may not even occur, because it will be cheap and easy to access intelligence.
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.
Thanks for reviewing and raising this! You’re right that the US/China dynamics are central to Situational Awareness’s thesis and we underemphasised them. We’ve now added a dedicated China/US section with its own tab and three expandable cards, evaluating his specific sub-predictions on infrastructure (7nm chips, power, Middle East), algorithms and open source, and strategic dynamics. Would value your review of the updated version if you have time!
Hmm. Not a super well-thought out take here, but it seems to me that Situational Awareness’ biggest crux is around whether an arms race dynamic would develop between the U.S. and China, and he lays out a few specific ways in which that might happen.
I don’t see any evidence of such an arms race taking place. China don’t have any frontier labs, only labs which distill other models. They haven’t yet produced a capable chip and seem at least a few years to half a decade off (much slower than Aschenbrenner’s predictions). They haven’t waged a state-sponsored cyberattack to steal model weights or algorithmic secrets—but I suppose you could argue it’s cheaper and easier to just distill in the short term?
In fact, given the ease of distillation and the proliferation of open-source models, it might be more reasonable to argue that such an arms race may not even occur, because it will be cheap and easy to access intelligence.
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!):
I mostly agree, though it’s not obvious to me that we ought to have sufficient evidence by now re: espionage.
Thanks for reviewing and raising this! You’re right that the US/China dynamics are central to Situational Awareness’s thesis and we underemphasised them. We’ve now added a dedicated China/US section with its own tab and three expandable cards, evaluating his specific sub-predictions on infrastructure (7nm chips, power, Middle East), algorithms and open source, and strategic dynamics. Would value your review of the updated version if you have time!