I’m American. Just giving some background to the feeling. There’s some discontent with some western communities (localllama) that Chinese developers have been open weighting all of their models while most western models have been closed weights.
Right now though China is dropping huge improvements across the entire spectrum of model sizes with Qwen, Kimi, DeepSeek, GLM, and Yi. We've also got Mistral doing competitive self-hosted models too, but they're French. Local AI tooling is plainly _not_ being driven forwards by the United States.
This is why the Chinese labs are so open, they don't ever need to make a profit, they just need to make good AI.
Xi Jinping has set AI as a national priority. This means that lenders (Chinese party run banks) will "lend" money to AI orgs with no financial strings attached. No business evaluation needed. This is how China does growth, they just fund it in the direction they want without much attention to profitability or returns. It's how you get billion dollar high speed rail lines that transport 50 people a day along the route.
Despite the many capitalist facets of China, it's core operations are still planned communist economy.
The US government just hasn't yet found a reason to directly pay for a domestic country to release open models. But it's not like we're above that at all.
As for why the US gets all the VC love, it's because the US has an extremely friendly business environment. People leave their home countries to start businesses in the US because of it. Europe has done a pretty good job suffocating their tech industry in comparison.
The US government only plays a relatively minor role in this too, because unlike China the US is not a planned economy.
They actually don't do that and, if you're up to speed on current events, Trump is pretty upset about it.