(posting from a throwaway for obvious reasons) I currently sell to autonomous vehicle (AV) companies and spoke to a number of them. I believe that (most) chine

(posting from a throwaway for obvious reasons) I currently sell to autonomous vehicle (AV) companies and spoke to a number of them. I believe that (most) chinese-money backed AV startup set up "R&D" offices in silicon valley purely for the tech/IP transfer back to China. Just to give you an example, an engineer at one of them boasted to me how his colleague, who used to work at a brand-name-AV-company-you've-heard-of, copied code & provided access to all of it internally. Although innovation in China might seem like a wild west to many Westerners, there's plenty of it happening there. It's impressive, extremely fast paced (10xSV), and deadly cut-throat. They know they're behind the US in AV and are playing catch up, with VC certainly knowing of & backing such approach. Circling back to this story - just check who's backing XiaoPeng Motors/xmotors.ai: $700M in funding from GGV, Alibaba, IDG, Foxconn & others. All their R&D is in China, with a very small office in Palo Alto. What do you think the office here is for? I don't believe this fellow Xiaolang Zhang acted without Xiaopeng's "encouragement". All of this being said, there are plenty of smart and honest engineers working on both sides of the Pacific to push the humanity forward. One could think though, maybe the more know-how transfer, the better for the entire world?