25 March 2025

The AI Superpower Rivalry: A Zero-sum Game Between China and the United States?

Dingding Chen, Yingfan Chen, and Runyu Huang

On March 13, OpenAI released a proposal for the U.S. AI Action Plan. The report asserts that while the United States currently holds a leading position in the field of artificial intelligence, the success of China-based DeepSeek indicates that this advantage is not as significant as it appears and is gradually narrowing. The AI Action Plan is intended to ensure that AI innovation in the United States continues to outpace that of China, thereby securing U.S. leadership in the AI domain.

However, reducing the rivalry to a simplistic “who leads in AI” frame overlooks its complexity. The competition between the U.S. and China in the AI domain is not a zero-sum game. Rather, it is a multifaceted and complex rivalry, shaped by numerous factors such as geopolitical considerations, access to data, talent, regulatory environments, and technological infrastructure.

The competition between China and the United States in the field of artificial intelligence has driven the development of AI technologies to a more diversified and differentiated contest. The development of large artificial intelligence models exemplifies the evolving nature of this competition. OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, for instance, is specifically designed for complex, high-performance tasks, excelling at intricate text generation and understanding through massive computational resources. This specialization allows it to handle tasks that require a deep grasp of language, context, and nuance. On the other hand, DeepMind’s Perceiver takes a different approach, offering a Transformer variant that can process multimodal data – such as images, sounds, and video – making it versatile across a variety of input types.

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