The US is the world leader in artificial intelligence, but a new report shows that China is rapidly expanding its development.
“China moves incredibly fast and can absolutely catch up if the United States falls off his game,” says Gregory Allen, senior adviser at the Wadhwani Ai Center in the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to Stanford’s AI index report, the US had 40 remarkable AI models in 2024, China had 15 and Europe had 3. While the US is far ahead of quantity, the benefit in quality is quickly closed.
Advice: America has to win the AI race – and prepare for the worst
“I think winning the AI race means that the US will remain the dominant power in the world in the 21st century,” said the White House AI and Crypto Tsar David Sacks. “It is true that since the launch of Deepseek I think we are only three to six months before China at the AI model layer.”
Sacks says that the AI model layer is only the surface of a larger stack of competition, but China shows the most improvement in that layer. Models are often assessed in various tests, including languages, math problems, general reasoning and coding. All platforms have improved in recent years, with jumps of 18.8% in general reasoning (MMMU) and 48.9% in PhD Level Science (GPQA). Coding accuracy (SWE-Bench) rose from 4.4% in 2023 to 71.7% in 2024.
David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto Tsar, is on it when President Donald Trump signs a series of executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on January 23, 2025 in Washington, DC (Getty Images)
“Ai is very, very good at learning how to be good in a certain test,” said Allen. “The same challenge you have with the college’s entrance exams – do you measure how capable a student has in his overall intellectual potential? Do you measure how good they are to study for standardized tests? There is a similar version of that phenomenon when it comes to AI.”
Experts expressed their concern about how quickly Chinese models have improved in recent years. At the end of 2023, American models performed 17.5% of the time better in understanding testing (MMLU). Chinese systems limited that gap to 0.3% in 2024. In general (MMMU) in general the benefit of 13.5% of the US decreased to 8.1% in the same period. In a more advanced language test (MMLU-Pro), the Chinese platform Deepseek-R1 placed a higher score than every American model.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVDA | Nvidia Corp. | 180.00 | +6.28 |
+3.62% |
“When it comes to where the US is stacking in global competition, I think the much more relevant figure is in the worldwide acceptance of technology,” all said.
According to Backklinko Backklinko of search engines, an estimated 20 million daily users will become more than 20 million daily users. Chatgpt has six times as many daily users as Deepseek, but the Chinese model has still received attention after it has risen to the top of App Store downloads in January.
Some states have banned Deepseek on government devices. It is amid to worry about how China Ai used for surveillance and censorship. However, some experts claim that the centralized government of Beijing and fewer restrictions for data privacy developers have given an advantage there.
The Chinese AI app Deepseek can be seen in Apple’s US App Store on an iPhone 12 on January 27, 2025. (Christoph Dernbach / Picture Alliance via Getty Images / Getty Images)
“We could bump ourselves with excessive regulations. We want regulations care and responsible. We want to make us make innovation possible,” Sacks said. “China is a formidable competitor, something like half of the AI researchers in the world come from China.”
In 2019, the US started regulating who has access to high -tech semiconductors, another layer in the technological stack.
“Our leading company is Nvidia, and the Chinese national champion is Huawei. And Nvidia is about two years ahead of Huawei, so that’s very good news,” Sacks said. “If the American technology stack will be taken over by, let’s say, 80% of the world, that means we have won the AI race. But if you look around the world in five years and Huawei has a market share of 80%, it means we have lost.”
Nvidia denies ‘Backdoors’ in chips after China has expressed concern about security
Export checks have limited Chinese companies such as Huawei to access the high-tech chips of Nvidia, which were used to develop AI tools.
“In the absence of this export control policy, that the Trump administration has doubled and strengthened in important ways, it is very likely that the biggest supercomputers for AI would already be in China that were driven by American technology,” Allen said.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nvidia Corp., keeps the AI Accelerator chips from the company for data centers. (Akio Kon / Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty images)
Some experts have argued that those limitations have made China self -sufficient as it cut the American technology. In a clear response to that success, the Trump administration decided to reinvent Nvidia chips to enter the Chinese market and compete against the fast-provancing semiconductors of Beijing.
“We have to control the standard. And the way to control the standards is to ensure that every company. Every AI developer, every country around the world is built on the American tech stack,” said founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang.
In the last layer in the technological stack, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company leads the field.
Click here to read more about FOX Business
“It is a Taiwanese non-American company, but it is on the west side of the ledger. And that is a few years before the Chinese equivalent, a company called Smic. So if you go deeper into the pile, our lead will grow,” Sacks said.
With the proximity of Taiwan to China, there are fears that Beijing could stack his technical deck against Washington.
“I remember that a Taiwanese production facility had to make great changes to the construction because a train line that was almost a mile distance, the vibrations from the trains disrupt this incredibly sensitive equipment,” Allen said. ‘So rain like bombs Taiwan In the midst of a military attack, these machines will be more than the calibration, they are destroyed, erased. And those are the costs of an invasion of Taiwan. “
