Tech supply chain daily: Beijing may put a firewall around its best AI models
The post Tech supply chain daily: Beijing may put a firewall around its best AI models appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. China’s AI firewall The AI race is starting to look less like a software land grab and more like an arms market where both sides have suddenly realised they may be exporting too much of the ammunition. For much of the past year, the anxiety ran one way. US frontier-model providers warned that Chinese developers were distilling, reverse-engineering or otherwise catching up too quickly. Whatever the exact mechanics, the commercial result was clear enough: Chinese models were improving rapidly, while their costs remained far below those of their US rivals. That mattered because the real threat to US frontier AI was never that Chinese models had to be better. They only had to be good enough. For coding, customer support, workflow automation and internal enterprise tasks, a cheaper model with roughly comparable capability could put serious pressure on token pricing and