Op-ed: The U.S. lead over China in AI is all but gone

The U.S. lead over China in AI is all but gone. Many in the U.S. contend that we still have a lead over China in the AI race, but recent events show Washington forced to respond to China competing at the frontier with successive breakthroughs. The headlines surrounding DeepSeek, Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, Alibaba's Qwen family of models, Tencent's Hunyuan, Zhipu AI, and MiniMax demonstrate that China has cultivated an AI ecosystem capable of repeatedly producing world-class capabilities across multiple firms. That holistic look at China's AI progress should concern policymakers, tech executives, investors, and America's allies far more than the latest benchmark score or model release.

For much of the past several years, the debate over artificial intelligence has revolved around two foundational questions: Can American technology companies continue to innovate at the technological frontier? And can the United States government develop a strategy capable of preserving America's technological advantage over China? Those questions have now been overtaken by events. The defining question is no longer whether China can compete at the frontier. It is whether the U.S. can adapt quickly enough to compete against an increasingly sophisticated Chinese innovation ecosystem that is advancing not only on model performance but also on cost, deployment, customization, financing, standards, developer adoption, and global reach.

Washington increasingly finds itself responding to successive Chinese breakthroughs rather than shaping the competitive environment in which artificial intelligence develops. That should concern policymakers, technology executives, investors, and America's allies far more than the latest benchmark score or model release because the competition is rapidly evolving beyond individual companies and becoming, instead, a contest between competing innovation ecosystems.

The headlines surrounding DeepSeek, Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, Alibaba's Qwen family of models, Tencent's Hunyuan, Zhipu AI and MiniMax are often treated as separate stories. They are anything but. Viewed collectively, they reveal something far more consequential than the emergence of several successful Chinese AI companies. They demonstrate that China has cultivated a frontier AI ecosystem capable of repeatedly producing world-class capabilities across multiple firms. Whether those advances emerge through original innovation, engineering optimization, open-weight collaboration, or from distillation of U.S. models is increasingly beside the point. The larger strategic reality is that they are occurring across an ecosystem, while the U.S. continues to evaluate them one company at a time and often responds as though each breakthrough were an isolated event rather than evidence of a broader structural transformation.

Over the past several years, the U.S. has consistently underestimated China's commitment to long-term technological advancement and its ability to translate domestic industrial strategy into global competitive advantage. Whether the issue was rare earths, electric vehicles, robotics, semiconductors, or artificial intelligence, the analytical mistake has remained remarkably consistent. Washington has tended to evaluate China's progress company by company and product by product, often dismissing each advance as exceptional or unsustainable, while Beijing has pursued a patient strategy designed to cultivate the conditions under which an entire ecosystem could innovate and deploy simultaneously. It is equally important to recognize that China's plans and long-term trajectory toward becoming...