Faced with less compute and fewer tokens, Chinese AI labs are tightening the gap with the US by just being more efficient

Fortune · 24 ● 9 sources

Chinese AI labs are closing some of the performance gap with U.S. labs by improving efficiency under constrained compute and token budgets, and U.S. agencies have also accused some Chinese companies of obtaining training capabilities via bulk subscriptions and training on model outputs. Stanford estimated Anthropic’s top model was ahead of DeepSeek’s by 2.7% earlier this year, while analysts cite algorithmic work that reduces attention-calculation complexity by an order of magnitude. Enterprises increasingly adopt Chinese open-weight models—such as via rising spending shares—while U.S. frontier models remain ahead on the most complex tasks.