Opinion: America’s AI edge over China has largely vanished—and it’s time to reset national strategy

In a pointed critique, Dewardric L. McNeal argues that the U.S. no longer holds a decisive lead over China in artificial intelligence and must pivot from a firm-by-firm mindset to an “ecosystem statecraft” strategy. China’s recent advances—from DeepSeek to Alibaba’s Qwen and Tencent’s Hunyuan—signal a coordinated innovation system focused on cost, deployment, customization, standards, and global reach, not just benchmark wins. U.S. tools such as export controls and investment screening matter, he writes, but they’re insufficient without a durable national plan that integrates alliances, standards-setting, talent, financing, and commercial partnerships. Adoption is increasingly bottom-up via developers and toolchains, making it harder to steer countries away from Chinese platforms than it was with telecom hardware. America retains core strengths in universities, venture capital, and semiconductors, but leadership will hinge on which ecosystem the world chooses to build on—requiring Washington to craft a long-horizon, administration-proof strategy.

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