GPT-4 crushed everything China produced, American labs published, raised, recruited at a pace that no one seemed able to keep up with. The 2026 report from the AI Index, published by the Stanford HAI Institute, disrupts this comfortable narrative. Indeed, “The performance gap identified between the most powerful American models and the Chinese versions dropped to 39 points Arena compared to over 300 in May 2023.”
Claude Opus 4.6 is still leading, but Dola-Seed 2.0 is close behind with 1,464 points against 1,503. In February 2025, DeepSeek-R1 briefly grabbed the top spot.
A change in the game
This rebalancing is not only explained by the progress of Chinese research. Whereas American players heavily bet on closed models and sky-high valuations, Beijing prioritized open source and large-scale industrial distribution. “The result is visible in factories, with 295,000 AI-driven robots operating in China compared to 34,200 in the United States.”
David Fishman, an energy analyst at Lantau Group, estimates that China absorbs an additional annual electrical demand equivalent to the entire consumption of Germany with reserves never falling below 80%. In contrast, the U.S. electrical grid has suffered decades of underinvestment. Goldman Sachs has already identified this fragility as a hindrance to the increase in data center usage. However, Anthropic accuses China of copying its AI.
Money isn’t everything
Despite this, investment figures still favor Americans. “285.9 billion dollars of private capital was injected into AI in 2025, which is 23 times the Chinese investment of 12.4 billion”. The United States created 1,953 new AI companies last year.
But China is building something different, a less capitalistic ecosystem firmly integrated into the industry. It is mainly supported by a pool of locally-trained talents. Almost the entire team behind the five founders of DeepSeek was trained in Chinese universities. Foreign researchers are increasingly shunning Beijing labs to move to San Francisco. The talent flow to the U.S. has dropped by 89% since 2017, with an 80% acceleration just in 2025.
The weight of politics
Stanford points to two drivers of this movement. The first is China’s internal momentum, which retains its researchers, sometimes under state pressure, as seen in the intensified monitoring of startup founders acquired by foreign actors. “The second is the American immigration policy under Donald Trump”, which has deterred profiles that Washington would have naturally absorbed five years ago. American dominance in AI has long relied on its ability to attract the best global minds.
