> Undercut the US AI providers and wait them out

You could have said the same of linux - that it extinguished proprietary OSs at least for server usecases.

true, but the motivations of OSS contributors are benign (overall)

Even Xi's speech was as paranoid as Dario Amodei about the possibility of Chinese AI achieving something at the level of say Mythos. If you seriously believe such a thing will be on Hugging Face I really don't know what to say.

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 scores higher than Fable 5 on Terminal-Bench, and Fable 5 is Mythos, correct?

There is already something on HuggingFace at the level of Mythos. It's called Kimi K3 and it's running laps around Opus5, Fable5, and Sol56 at cybersecurity.

It's so good that the US government is rushing to ban all Chinese models as fast as they can.

Fine, you believe Anthropic was lying about Mythos. In fact no view of the matter is needed to formulate the proposition above. It is clear China will soon have a model with the powers imputed to Mythos but which you deny of actual Mythos. It is a trial to deal with this level of ideological blindness; 'ideology has no outside'. If someone says 'when they get Mythos...', declare the possibility of Mythos to be the real lie. But it is quite possible and will be coming in months.

Reading between the lines, it's fairly clear that Mythos Preview only got its reported results in offensive cyber thanks to a highly specialized harness and humongous amounts of test-time compute. We also don't know what kind of post-training/fine-tuning it got on cyber, Anthropic only stated that it wasn't specifically trained for cyber-offense but that leaves a lot of scope for training on other related things. Overall, the Mythos story is a lot less interesting than most people might like to claim - but note that this doesn't require any actual lying.

The interest around K3 is a lot more defensible because we actually know what the architecture looks like, how much effort it takes to get it to run, and what kinds of results it gets on cyber evaluations. And no, it's nowhere near "dangerous" enough to where people might honestly want to ban it for real safety reasons. It does a good enough job at fixing cyber issues, but that's hardly a safety concern.

They're not even really undercutting the US right now. They are releasing their models for free. There's plenty of US businesses who's entire existence is hosting these open source models that they didn't pay any Chinese company a single dime for. If anything they're helping create a less centralized and healthier American market