For most of the artificial intelligence revolution, the global race has revolved around a small group of American companies. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have swapped places at the top, with each new model briefly claiming the title of the world’s most advanced AI system.

Chinese firms occasionally disrupted that narrative, producing powerful models at lower costs. But despite releases such as DeepSeek, the conventional wisdom maintained that China’s leading laboratories were six to 12 months behind their American competitors.