[News] China Reportedly Closes AI Performance Gap with U.S., Stanford Report Says; Anthropic Leads by Just 2.7%

The U.S.’s lead in AI may be narrowing. According to the latest report from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI), China has reportedly closed the performance gap with the U.S. The report notes that U.S. and Chinese models have traded the lead multiple times since early 2025, with DeepSeek-R1 briefly matching the top U.S. model in February 2025 and Anthropic’s leading model holding just a 2.7% edge by March 2026.

This marks a sharp contrast with previous research. As noted by Chosun Biz, the score gap between top U.S. and Chinese models exceeded 300 points in 2023.

As the Stanford report notes, the U.S. retains an edge in high-impact patents and produced 50 notable models in 2025, compared with China’s 30. Meanwhile, China leads in publication volume, citations, total patent output, and industrial robot installations, while South Korea stands out in innovation density, ranking first globally in AI patents per capita.

In addition, the Standford report also highlights that the U.S. hosts the most AI data centers, more than 10 times that of any other country, even as the U.S.-China AI model performance gap has narrowed.

On the investment front, the report notes that while the U.S. continues to lead in AI investment, its ability to attract global talent is declining. U.S. private AI investment reached $285.9 billion in 2025, more than 23 times China’s $12.4 billion, though focusing solely on private investment may understate China’s total spending given its government-backed funds, the report adds. However, the number of AI researchers and developers moving to the U.S. has fallen by 89% since 2017, including an 80% drop in the past year alone.

Amid the rapid rise of Chinese AI models, U.S. companies are taking action. According to Bloomberg, citing sources, rivals OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have begun collaborating to curb Chinese competitors from extracting outputs from advanced U.S. AI models to gain an edge in the global race. The firms are sharing information through the Frontier Model Forum to detect so-called adversarial distillation attempts that violate their terms of service.

(Photo credit: FREEPIK)

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