AI Weekly Issue #515: China's AI is redrawing the AI race

Two stories this week, connected by one word: open. A Chinese open-weight model helped touch off the worst week for chip stocks since April, as investors finally asked what $725 billion in AI capex is buying. Days later, when an autonomous agent breached Hugging Face, its own defenders were locked out by US frontier-model guardrails and ran the forensics on an open Chinese model instead. On both fronts the closed American frontier bet had a bad week, and open weight was the common winner. Meanwhile Washington spent the same week making the closed models harder to buy at all. Below: the sell-off and its trigger, AI on both sides of the security desk, and the state moving inside the stack.