The Chinese Communist party very much sees itself in a global rivalry over "new productive forces". That's official policy. And US leadership basically agrees.
The US is playing dirty by essentially embargoing China over big AI - why wouldn't it occur to them to retaliate by playing dirtier?
I mean we probably won't know for sure, but it's much less far fetched than a lot of other speculation in this area.
E.g., R1's cold start training could probably have benefited quite a bit from having access to OpenAI's chain of thought data for training. The paper is a bit light on detail on how it was made.
