9 April 2025

The AI Race Has Gotten Crowded—and China Is Closing In on the US

Will Knight

The year that ChatGPT went viral, only two US companies—OpenAI and Google—could boast truly cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Three years on, AI is no longer a two-horse race, nor is it purely an American one. A new report published today by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) highlights just how crowded the field has become.

The institute’s 2025 AI index, which collates data and trends on the state of the AI industry, paints a picture of an increasingly competitive, global, and unrestrained race toward artificial general intelligence—AI that surpasses human abilities.

OpenAI and Google are still neck and neck in the race to build bleeding-edge AI, the report shows. But several other companies are closing in. In the US, the fiercest competition comes from Meta’s open-weight Llama models; Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI employees; and Elon Musk’s xAI.

Most strikingly, according to a widely used benchmark called LMSYS, the latest model from China’s DeepSeek, R1, ranks closest to the top-performing models built by the two leading American AI companies.

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