SITUATION EXPLAINED: Would China be ahead on AI if it could buy US chips? • The controls made a real difference on compute and much less on model quality. In late 2025, US firms accounted for 96% of total global compute capacity • They didn't stop China from producing frontier-adjacent models • If Chinese labs are this good with this few chips, more chips would mean better models • The standard list of reasons the US leads beyond compute doesn't hold up well. Chinese research labs predate the…