To weaken the stature of the USA on the global stage relative to themselves. Perhaps decrease US investment in AI and slow creation of some general AI superweapon I suppose.

I think you are overthinking it. The reason why Chinese AI labs have to go open source is because they do not have the clout to freely expand to international markets. Therefore, in order to succeed and get attention, they are providing their models for free if you have the inference hardware.

  Well that's the position that these chinese firms are trying to convince us of, and they can convince us by undercutting proprietary models in price/performance/openness.

I don't think these firms have said there is a US AI bubble and they're trying to pop it.

  Because they haven't bet the farm on AI like the USA has.

They are. The only problem is that they can't buy Nvidia chips or EUV machines so they're bottlenecked.