A recent survey conducted by the World Economic Forum in September revealed that 69% of specialists believe the disparity between the leading AI models from the U.S. and China may vanish within the upcoming year. At the start of 2026, Epoch AI reported that Chinese AI models were approximately seven months behind their American equivalents; however, by the middle of the year, this gap had decreased to around 4.5 to 5 months. Notably, China's Kimi K3, launched in July, surpassed the GPT-5.3 Codex, which was released in February, on Epoch AI's ranking list, although it still lags behind GPT-5.4 Pro, introduced in March. The Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index supports this trend, indicating that Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6-Pro, the leading Chinese model, achieved a score of 46, comparable to GPT-6 Astra in its lowest reasoning tier and Grok 4.7. In contrast, the top U.S. model, Claude Opus 5.5, boasts a score of 58. Additionally, China leads in AI patent filings, with six out of the top ten generative AI patent applicants being Chinese entities. The question remains: Will China close the AI gap with the U.S. in the next year?
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