America’s lead over China in the race to build increasingly powerful artificial intelligence is far from assured, analysts said.
As it stands, US firms have the upper hand, but breakthroughs by Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Huawei suggest the gap is narrowing fast, two experts wrote in Foreign Affairs, warning that the US needs to prepare itself to lose the AI competition to China.
Washington should mitigate that risk, including by making its models more open and attractive, they argued.
Models like DeepSeek’s R1 make a case for more Western focus on building “cheap, powerful, yet compute-efficient models” for global markets, the head of global policy at Hugging Face told Rest of World: “I see this race as a culmination of years of different cultural values.”