中方在AI领域迅速追赶美方
中方已显著侵蚀美方在人工智能领域的领先地位。根据斯坦福大学 HAI 发布的 2026 年人工智能指数报告，中方在 AI 机器人性能方面几乎缩小了与美方的差距，同时在专利数量、论文发表和机器人部署方面继续保持全球领先。
关键性能差距缩窄
报告发现，美方与中方顶尖 AI 机器人之间的 Arena 分数（衡量大语言模型相对性能的指标）差距正在缩小。2023 年 5 月，美方的顶尖模型 GPT-4 领先中方模型 300 多分；到 2026 年 3 月，这一差距已降至 39 分。美方顶尖模型 Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 仅领先中方的 Dola-Seed 2.0 约 2.7%。
研发与应用对比
- 论文引用：中方 AI 论文引用率占全球 20.6%，而美方为 12.6%。
- 工业机器人：中方安装量超过 29.5 万台，几乎是美方（3.42 万台）的 9 倍。
- 模型数量：美方在顶尖模型数量上仍保持 50 比 30 的优势。
战略评估
斯坦福大学在报告总结中指出：“多年来，美方在 AI 模型规模、性能和研究方面一直领先全球。但中方现已成为美方的关键竞争对手，并在今年几乎抹平了美方的任何领先优势。”
尽管投资额较少且面临更广泛的监管约束，中方通过加大对初创企业的注资改变了竞争态势。去年香港 AI 相关的 IPO 创下五年新高。此外，中方还在电力基础设施领域投入巨资，以支撑日益增长的 AI 算力需求。
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 summary of the report. “But China emerged as an AI counterweight to the U.S., gradually gaining ground, and this year it appears to have nearly erased any U.S. lead.”
China’s AI surge
Despite fewer investment dollars and wider regulatory constraints, China has changed the narrative of its ability to compete against the U.S. in a broader tech war. Spurred by its 2025 “DeepSeek moment,” China has poured funding into AI startups, with IPOs in Hong Kong last quarter reaching a five-year high of $110 billion across 40 new listings.
China has also quietly invested in its electricity infrastructure, adding more electricity demand than the entire consumption of Germany every year, David Fishman, a China energy analyst with the Lantau Group, previously said in an interview with Fortune. The country’s reserve margin has never dipped below 80%, Fishman said, essentially giving it twice the necessary capacity to grow AI compute.
China’s compute capacity is a far cry from the U.S.’s own ability to sustain and grow AI infrastructure. The American power grid system is crumbling as a result of decades of underinvestment, making it vulnerable to extreme weather and natural disasters, and ultimately creating a bottleneck Goldman Sachs suggests would stymie AI growth in the U.S.
“We’ve actually reduced our exposure to U.S. tech,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies global macro strategist, told Fortune at the bank’s Asia Forum in Hong Kong last month. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation.”
American private investment in AI still far
