Original Summary

Getty Images / The US and China are locked in a race to develop AI "Whoever wins AI, WINS!" US President Donald Trump has been blunt about his AI ambitions, as well as about who he considers the US's main rival to be: China. His Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, has not said anything so forthright - but it seems he holds a similar view. "China very much sees it as a race, they very much think China should be the leading force in AI - they see AI as a power maximiser," says Rebecca Arcesati, from the Mercator Institute for China Studies. You can look beyond the rhetoric for evidence of this: AI has been a cornerstone of China's technological ambitions for more than a decade, whether Xi emphasises it publicly or not. For Trump, beating China to AI supremacy outweighs any risks of the technology to humans - something he has described as "a hoax". China's foreign ministry warned that "narratives of threat" and confrontation hinder global AI governance, calling for cooperation to ensure it benefits all. It means when the two presidents sit down on Thursday there will be few more important topics than their AI ambitions - and what they say and decide will matter to the whole world. Is the US in the lead? There's no doubt the US and China are global leaders in AI but who is ahead depends on how success is measured. American companies lead on so-called frontier models, with the highest-performing systems on most benchmarks coming from firms such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. In February 2025, an AI model by China's DeepSeek "briefly matched the top US model" and as of March 2026, Anthropic's top model led the pack "by just 2.7%", according to researchers at Stanford University. Part of the US advantage stems from the vast sums being invested in leading AI companies as the frontier labs burn through mountains of cash to build the infrastructure to train new models. Getty Images / OpenAI boss Sam Altman called for a coordinated slowdown of advanced AI development The stock market is booming and a large part of the US economy's expansion relies on the enormous growth - and projected profitability - of AI companies. So that might partly explain why President Trump sees AI as key to US success. Another factor limiting China's ability is the sweeping government restrictions placed on US companies that prevent them from selling advanced microchips to Chinese firms - these are crucial for developing cutting-edge models. China's advantage Despite the chip restrictions, new AI models are coming out almost monthly in both countries and it's unclear what "winning" the AI race would actually mean, or whether there is a finish line at all. Many companies are racing to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical form of AI capable of learning, reasoning and performing a wide range of tasks at or above the level of humans. The Chinese AI industry has so far focused not on creating frontier models but releasing what is known as open weight models - downloadable and tweakable in a similar way to open source software. This contrasts with the approach taken by many US firms, which largely focus on proprietary models accessed through paid subscriptions or company platforms. Chinese open weight models are being released at a rapid pace, with benchmarks showing the country's top models trailing US rivals by only a few months. Models such as Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 have become popular in China and overseas because they perform close to the frontier models while remaining freely downloadable and adaptable. Beijing's focus is more about deploying the technology across its economy, China analyst Lizzi Lee from the Asia Society Policy Institute said. "AI isn't the moon landing," she said. "The US may lead at the frontier, while China could still gain enormous economic and geopolitical leverage by making capable AI cheap, open and ubiquitous." Future Publishing via Getty Images / Yang Zhilin co-founded Moonshot, one of China's most successful AI models, in 2023 AI is also very energy hungry, and China is very well placed there, Rebecca Arcesati told Tech Life on the BBC World Service. "Chinese AI companies are able to access the electricity they need for a much lower cost and that really is an advantage," she said. In robotics - a field of AI that some believe will be world-changing - China has become the world's biggest manufacturer of robots, with more than two million working in the country's factories, the International Federation of Robotics estimated. The nation is also the world's biggest maker of humanoid robots, accounting for more than nine-tenths of global shipments in the first half of the year, according to independent policy institute Chatham House. Chinese AI developers have showed "remarkable resilience and innovation" in spite of the shortage of advanced American chips, analyst Lian Jye Su from tech research firm Omdia said. But US officials and AI firms have also alleged that Chinese developers closed the gap by using distillation - a technique that enables models to learn from more advanced platforms. China's foreign ministry said in response that AI development was "fuelled" by the country's "vision of extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit". Safety concerns? China and the US may be in fierce competition, but their governments' approaches to safety concerns are markedly different. While some in the industry have recently warned that AI could pose an existential risk to humanity, Chinese researchers seem less concerned about that and are more worried about potential misuse of the technology and cyber war. Responding to concerns over AI, Trump has said the US already has sufficient rules in place and that the only guardrails AI needs are a "high IQ" president. "We're leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we're going to keep it that way," Trump said this week, adding that the US was not going to "stifle the growth of something that will be bigger

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：英语新闻 / BBC News Top Stories
  • 发布时间：2026/9/24 06:01:17