Frontier AI Got Cheap, Open, and Chinese

The story of the year was supposed to be who controls AI. The real story this week: control and cost split in opposite directions, and your business lives in the gap.The market already switched. US labs fell from 72% to 33% of model traffic on OpenRouter in a year; Chinese models now hold six of the top ten spots. One startup, Lindy, moved 100% of its traffic to DeepSeek.The capability gap closed. Zhipu's open-weight GLM-5.2 landed within a point of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on a key agentic benchmark, at roughly a fifth of the cost — and you can run it on your own servers.The theft question. Anthropic alleges Alibaba ran ~25,000 fake accounts and 28.8 million Claude conversations to distill its models (Alibaba denies). Senators are now moving to attach a sanctions amendment to the NDAA.Host Stephen Forte on what model sovereignty means for your stack, your budget, and your leverage — and the two moves to make before your next budget review.Sources: CNBC; The Strategy Stack; Nate's Newsletter.