{"id":387509,"date":"2026-04-19T17:12:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T17:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/387509\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T17:12:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T17:12:17","slug":"china-is-starting-to-pull-ahead-of-us-in-ai-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/387509\/","title":{"rendered":"China Is Starting to Pull Ahead of US in AI Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 2017, China\u2019s state council laid out the first draft of its long-term AI strategy in a sweeping policy paper. By 2030, it declared, China should have developed its \u201cAI industry competitiveness\u201d to a \u201cworld-leading level,\u201d an ambitious goal for a country whose future economic prosperity was not a given<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, China\u2019s patient cultivation of world-leading AI is bearing lush fruit, while the US struggles to harvest from its own blighted grove<\/a>. If we truly are in the midst of an epic AI arms race \u2014 as any China hawk will loudly declare<\/a> to be the case \u2014 then the PRC is clearly taking the lead.<\/p>\n

Every year, Stanford University\u2019s Institute for Human-Centered AI publishes a major report on the state of AI around the world. According to its recently released 2026 paper<\/a>, first reported by Fortune<\/a>, America\u2019s AI crown is now slipping. China now leads the world in AI research publications and citations, and is deploying industrial AI-integrated robots<\/a> at nearly nine times the US rate.<\/p>\n

Then there are the patents, which is where the story really gets ugly. In 2024, China represented over 74 percent of the world\u2019s AI patent grants, compared to a distant 12 percent by the US, and a paltry 3 percent from the European Union, Stanford found<\/a>. International economists reached the same conclusion in a yet-to-be peer reviewed paper<\/a>, arguing that America\u2019s AI patents are few and far between because they\u2019re \u201chighly concentrated among a small set of large private firms.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the top US AI models still have a technical edge in Arena scores \u2014 rankings that measure the quality of an AI system, basically \u2014 the \u201csubstantial lead\u201d American AI once had \u201cshrank considerably by early 2025,\u201d the Stanford report admits<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cUS and Chinese models have traded places at the top of performance rankings multiple times since early 2025,\u201d the report states. \u201cIn February 2025, DeepSeek-R1 briefly matched the top US model. As of March 2026, the top U.S. model leads by 2.7 percent, with a gap that fluctuated over the past\u00a0 year while remaining in the single digits.\u201d<\/p>\n

America does lead in one category: investment. Last year, US private interests spent $258.9 billion on AI, against China\u2019s $12.4 billion. If this is an arms race, as the hawks would claim, the US is eating some very expensive dust.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor years, the US outpaced all other global regions on AI \u2014 in model size, performance, artificial intelligence research, citations, and more,\u201d Stanford\u2019s\u00a0summary\u00a0of the report concludes. \u201cBut China emerged as an AI counterweight to the US, gradually gaining ground, and this year it appears to have nearly erased any US lead.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on the People\u2019s Republic: China Is Rapidly Overtaking the United States as the World\u2019s Scientific Superpower<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2017, China\u2019s state council laid out the first draft of its long-term AI strategy in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,607,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-387509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-china","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}