China Is Starting to Pull Ahead of US in AI Race

Stanford AI Index 2026: China narrows US lead to 2.7% while spending 23x less on AI investment

In short: Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report finds the performance gap between the best American and Chinese AI models has collapsed to 2.7%, down from 17.5-31.6 percentage points in May 2023, despite the US spending 23 times more on private AI investment ($285.9 billion vs $12.4 billion). China leads in AI patents (69.7% of global […] This story continues at The Next Web

China Is Starting to Pull Ahead of US in AI Race

Back in 2017, China’s 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 “AI industry competitiveness” to a “world-leading level,” an ambitious goal for a country whose future economic prosperity was not a given. Today, China’s patient cultivation of world-leading AI is bearing lush fruit, while the US struggles to harvest from its own blighted gro…