The U.S. and China are splitting the AI race, with America maintaining a lead in large language models and the advanced chips that power them, while China surges ahead in robotics and mass manufacturing. Washington has tightened export controls—leveraging Nvidia’s chip dominance and Dutch firm ASML’s EUV tools—to keep China from the most advanced semiconductors. Beijing has countered with DeepSeek, a low-cost model that narrows the capability gap and underscores China’s push for self-reliance via open-source collaboration. China also dominates “AI bodies,” building and exporting humanoid robots at scale, while the U.S. still leads in the high-value “brains” for complex, agentic tasks—from industrial inspection to autonomous targeting. The outcome may hinge less on firsts than on breadth of deployment, standard-setting, and how effectively each economy embeds AI across industries.
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