AI Competition Heats Up as China Nearly Overtakes the United States

KOMPAS.com - The United States’ (US) dominance as the global king of artificial intelligence (AI) appears to be on the brink. China’s progress in the technology sector is steadily closing the gap with Uncle Sam’s country. More surprisingly, the flow of tech experts and AI researchers who usually flock to the US has reportedly dropped dramatically. This shocking fact was revealed in the annual AI Index 2026 report released by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) this week. The report highlights a significant shrinkage in the gap on the Arena score, a metric for measuring the performance of large language models (LLMs). For comparison, in May 2023, the US’s top AI model, OpenAI’s GPT-4, led far ahead with a score of over 1,300 points, while China’s models struggled below 1,000 points. However, by March 2026, that divide has shrunk dramatically to just 39 points. The US’s current top model, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, is only ahead by a slim 2.7 percent compared to China’s champion, Dola-Seed 2.0. Although the US still leads in the number of top AI models (50 models compared to China’s 30), the Bamboo Curtain country has dominated in other sectors. The report notes that China contributed 20.6 percent of AI publications in 2024, surpassing the US’s 12.6 percent. “For years, the US has outperformed all global regions in AI, both in model size, performance, research, citations, and more,” states the report’s summary from Stanford. However, China has emerged as a counterbalance to US AI power, gradually catching up, and this year it seems to have nearly erased the US’s advantage. As a result, initial public offerings (IPOs) in Hong Kong last quarter hit a five-year record high, reaching 110 billion US dollars across 40 new companies. Behind the scenes, China is also quietly building massive-scale electricity infrastructure.