If our government cared enough to regulate, they could also directly negotiate with China. There are proposed agreements that don't require either party to trust each other, and even if China doesn't want out of this race, we could pressure them other things like trade.
Examples: FlexHEG from Bengio (proposes on-chip mechanisms that allow workload verification without trust), large bilateral investments into joint AI interpretability or alignment efforts, or invasive audits & inspections (data centers for training these models have a large footprint + this can combine with on-chip mechanisms since producing chips is even more complicated).
And there are probably better proposals available for people to find, if we actually prioritized this.
Examples: FlexHEG from Bengio (proposes on-chip mechanisms that allow workload verification without trust), large bilateral investments into joint AI interpretability or alignment efforts, or invasive audits & inspections (data centers for training these models have a large footprint + this can combine with on-chip mechanisms since producing chips is even more complicated).
And there are probably better proposals available for people to find, if we actually prioritized this.