China has taken a bite out of the U.S.’s lead in artificial intelligence.
The report found a shrinking gap in Arena scores—a metric indicating relative performances of large language models—between the top AI bots in the U.S. and China. In May 2023, the U.S.’s top model, OpenAI’s GPT-4, led with more than 1,300 Arena points compared with China’s fewer than 1,000. By March 2026, that gulf shrank to just 39 Arena points, with the top U.S. model, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, leading China’s Dola-Seed 2.0 by just 2.7%.
While the U.S. still beats China in the number of top AI models—50 compared with 30—China has more publication citations than the U.S., accounting for 20.6% of AI citations in 2024 compared with the U.S.’s 12.6%. China also has nearly nine times the volume of industrial robot installations, leading the world with more than 295,000, compared with the U.S.’s 34,200.
American private investment in AI still far exceeds China’s, reaching $285.9 billion in 2025, more than 23 times China’s $12.4 billion. The U.S. funded 1,953 new AI companies last year, more than 10 times any other country, the Stanford report noted.
AI’s momentum swing in China’s favor may be contributing to a slowdown in tech talent entering the U.S. The Stanford report found the number of AI scholars moving to the U.S. dropped 89% since 2017, and that decline is happening precipitously, accelerating 80% in the past year alone. At this juncture, more researchers are still entering the U.S. than leaving it.
“The U.S. is home to the most AI researchers and developers of any country by far,” the report summary said. “But the flow of these experts into the country is dramatically slowing.”
“These talent patterns represent a fundamental challenge to U.S. technological leadership that export controls and computing investments alone cannot address,” the authors wrote.
