COLD WAR II IS FOUGHT IN REALMS THAT DIDN’T EVEN EXIST DURING COLD WAR I: Open-Weight Diplomacy: How China’s AI Models Are Rerunning the Digital Silk Road.

China’s open-weight AI models are sparking debates that echo the concerns the telecom buildout raised: How does the majority world access an indispensable technology without surrendering sovereignty, or in other words, without trading access today for dependency tomorrow?

China’s playbook appears virtually identical to its telecom strategy. Its AI buildout involves many of the same companies, the same countries, and the same vocabulary as its broadband strategy. And open weights play the role subsidized equipment once did: They are the keystone to an indispensable new technology that one country can provide to another virtually for free to get a foot in the door, but they are also useless without the intricate, interconnected stack of other components that, conveniently, are far more expensive.

Read the whole thing.