China has ‘nearly erased’ America’s lead in AI—and the flow of tech experts moving to the U.S. is slowing to a trickle, Stanford report says

China has taken a bite out of the U.S.’s lead in artificial intelligence.

The country has nearly closed its gap to the U.S. in AI bot performance, while continuing to best global competition in number of patents, publications, and rollout of robots, according to the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) 2026 AI Index report released this week.

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.

“For years, the U.S. outpaced all other global regions on AI—in model size, performance, artificial intelligence research, citations, and more,” said Stanford’s Read Entire Article