69% of experts surveyed by the World Economic Forum in September believe the gap between the most advanced U.S. and Chinese AI models could disappear within the next 12 months.
At the beginning of 2026, Epoch AI estimated Chinese models were, on average, about seven months behind U.S. counterparts. By midyear, that gap had shrunk to 4.5โ5 months.
โ For example, China's Kimi K3, released in July, ranks higher on Epoch AI's leaderboard than GPT-5.3 Codex, released in February, though it still trails GPT-5.4 Pro from March.
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index shows a similar gap. Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6-Pro, currently the highest-scoring Chinese model, has 46 pointsโputting it on par with GPT-6 Astra in its lowest-reasoning mode and Grok 4.7. The top U.S. model, Claude Opus 5.5, scores 58.
๐ China is already ahead in AI patents: six of the 10 top genAI patent applicants are Chinese.
Will China catch up with the U.S. in AI withinโฆ
@aicoursesdaily