US China AI gap hits near zero, Stanford report shows

The strategic buffer American policymakers once assumed existed between US and Chinese artificial intelligence capabilities has largely evaporated, according to Stanford University's 2026 AI Index report.

The two countries have traded the lead in model performance multiple times since early 2025, a pattern the report describes plainly as the gap havingeffectively closed.

The numbers that will unsettle Washington most are the model benchmarks. In February 2025, China's DeepSeek-R1 briefly matched the best-performing American system outright.

By March 2026, Anthropic's leading model held an advantage of just 2.7%, a margin thin enough to flip on the next major release from either side.

The US still produced 50 notable AI models in 2025 against China's 30, maintaining a quantitative edge in frontier system development. But the performance gap those extra models once represented has largely disappeared.

China's superiority is most clear when it comes to intellectual property. Chinese organizations were issued 97,206 patents for AI in 2024, accounting for 74.2% of the 131,121 patents issued worldwide. The US, which held a market share of 42.8% in 2015, has now dropped to 12.1%.

Research output is no different. China was responsible for 17.8% of all AI publications in 2024, compared to just 7.6% for the US. Chinese papers also garnered 20.6% of all citations of AI research globally, with the US receiving 12.6%.

In terms of the 100 most cited AI papers around the world, China's presence increased from 33 in 2021 to 41 in 2024, while the US dropped from 64 in 2021 to 46 in 2024.

American private investment in AI hit $285.9 billion in 2025, more than twenty times the amount China invested privately. Furthermore, the US introduced 1,953 new startups specialising in AI technology in the same year, an order of magnitude more than any other nation.

The Stanford University report highlights that China's figures are understated because the government is a major funder of AI technology, and these funds do not go into private markets.