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This is not a 'more tokens' task but a 'more intelligence' task, requiring ultra-long horizons and qualitatively superhuman ability.
It would be far easier to make a fun AAA game. It would be far easier to write a LOTR-tier book series. Humans have at least done those things in the past, individually or collectively. Nobody has ever made an unhackable, actually useable system. A system will have to be considered in its entirety, AI training is complex and can't just be reduced to small pieces to be secured independently of eachother. At minimum all this will have to run together performantly. That is no small feat and cannot be achieved monkey-typewriter style.
If it were merely about spending a few billion dollars and a lot of programmer time wouldn't the Pentagon/NSA be totally secured against cyberattack by now? They're not, even state actors can't do this.
I can't understand the world you're proposing, where Chinese AIs are smart enough to shield the entire Chinese training stack but US AIs are not smart enough to hack them before the shield can be completed. The trend suggests that at any given point in time, US AIs are smarter than their Chinese siblings. So there will be a gap between when this defence-shield can be completed and when the US could launch its attack. The US will likely retain a qualitative and quantitative advantage in AI this whole time.
If the Chinese AI can see 'this software is subtly vulnerable to infiltration, I'll write this replacement to secure it and then fit it in with the rest of the stack while still maintaining performance' why can't an American AI see 'this software is subtly vulnerable to infiltration, I'll infiltrate and exploit it before the upgrade process is complete?'
Why is my 'superhacker AGI' lazy thinking but not your 'superhuman perfect defence + performant AI training stack code-writer AI' not lazy thinking? I agree that it's possible in principle but the former will come before the latter.
If China has 100 quadrillion tokens, then the US will have yet more, they have more compute after all. I doubt Doubao's tokens are worth as much as Gemini or OpenAI's, 'token' could be anywhere on the curve of intelligence and cost.
Maybe the US decides not to hack, maybe somebody cuts a deal, maybe Trump makes some inexplicable decision or maybe AGI isn't a big deal. But I don't see your scenario happening.
Furthermore, there are still hardware issues to consider. There are probably many unfixable flaws that humans aren't smart enough to find like these: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/5-years-of-intel-cpus-and-chipsets-have-a-concerning-flaw-thats-unfixable/
State actors have trash talent, for reasons discussed earlier. A few outliers, but at this point Google has like 100x NSA's capability. This needs Google's capability at 100x the scale of labor. Where we differ is that I think this doesn't require 100x Google's capability.
Because the American AI only has access to internet-connected surfaces, is rate-limited and needs to avoid detection before breach, whereas Chinese AI has root access to the entire stack plus documentation and source code and can examine those subtle vulnerabilities in a massively parallel manner and at its leisure.
The point you keep missing is that at every point, information and time asymmetry exists in favor of the defender, which I think makes up for the observed qualitative and quantitative advantage of the attacker.
I maintain that this is a lazy hope for having an unfair advantage and scarcely different from "we could bomb three gorges dam, we just choose not to".
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