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Unpacking US-China "Decoupling" in AI Unpacking US-China “Decoupling” in AI by MIOIR | 22 May 2025 | Emerging technologies , Innovation and technology management , Responsible research and innovation , Science, technology and innovation policy | 0 comments Authors: Xinger Wei and Peiyu Zhan Earlier this year, the release of DeepSeek—an open-source large language model from China—intensified the technological competition between the United States and China. In response, one U.S. lawmaker proposed the “Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act” (S.321) , which directly promotes “technological decoupling.” The University System of Georgia swiftly placed DeepSeek on their prohibited applications list — citing data security and cybersecurity risks —alongside platforms like TikTok and WeChat. This rapid escalation of restrictions highlights how AI tools can become flashpoints for broader geopolitical and commercial tensions. Technological Decoupling: An Overview Historically, whenever a rising power’s industries approached U.S. competitiveness—from the Soviet Union’s space and missile technology to Japan’s semiconductor edge in the 1980s—the U.S. responded…

The Future Is Physical AI: Inside China's Robotics Revolution Tech The Future Is Physical AI: Inside China’s Robotics Revolution By Greg Ombach , Forbes Councils Member. for Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Nov 20, 2025, 07:45am EST Greg Ombach, Head of Disruptive Research, Technology & Innovation, Senior Vice President at Airbus . getty The robotics revolution isn’t coming; it has already started. Over the past year, I travelled to China, Japan and Korea to see some of the world’s most advanced humanoid and adaptive robotics firms. What I found was not only a wave of innovation but a coordinated industrial movement. Companies like AGIBot, Flexiv, Unitree, Ubtech, Fourier and LimX aren’t simply building impressive demos; they are shaping entire ecosystems with government support, local supply chains and bold scaling goals. China has made humanoids a national priority and is expected to manufacture at least 10,000 by 2026 . Walking through labs and production halls, I could see how hardware, edge AI and manufacturing have fused at unprecedented …

China weighs curbs on overseas access to their advanced AI models: Report Chinese officials are discussing restricting overseas access to advanced artificial intelligence models. These talks involve major technology firms like Alibaba and ByteDance. The government views cutting-edge AI as a strategic national asset amid global competition. Discussions also covered strengthening legal protections for proprietary AI technology. This move follows China's increasing global traction in the AI sector.

Chinese AI steps onto global stage as GLM-5.2 narrows frontier gap Our Privacy Statement & Cookie Policy By continuing to browse our site you agree to our use of cookies, revised Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. You can change your cookie settings through your browser. CGTN Copied The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) was held at the Shanghai Expo Exhibition Hall, July 28, 2025. /VCG As the Communist Party of China marks its 105th anniversary, a new chapter is unfolding in the nation's quest for technological self-reliance. Chinese AI company Z.ai (Zhipu AI) released and open-sourced its flagship model GLM-5.2 on June 17, according to Chinese media outlet Science and Technology Daily. The model ranks among the world's top AI models on multiple benchmarks, according to company statements cited in the report. Z.ai said GLM-5.2 ranks first among globally available models on Code Arena, a front-end coding evaluation system involving millions of users in blind tests. On the Artificial Analysis comprehensive leaderboard, the model scored 51 points, making it the top open-source model, according to China Daily. On long-horizon coding benchmarks, GLM-5.2 trails Ant…

"China's Brain-Mimicking AI Crushes Nvidia": SpikingBrain 1.0 Processes ... News, investigations, and analysis — our top stories every morning to start your day right. In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, a groundbreaking development has emerged from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Automation in Beijing. Researchers have unveiled SpikingBrain 1.0, a novel AI system designed to mimic the efficiency of the human brain. This innovative model aims to revolutionize the way AI processes data by utilizing less energy and operating on domestic Chinese hardware. By drawing inspiration from neuromorphic computing, the team behind SpikingBrain 1.0 has potentially set a new standard for AI efficiency and speed, challenging industry norms dominated by companies like Nvidia. At the heart of SpikingBrain 1.0 lies a technology known as “spiking computation.” This method replicates the way biological neurons in the human brain operate. Unlike traditional AI systems that activate entire networks to process data, SpikingBrain 1.0 employs an event-driven approach. Neurons in this system fire signals only when specifically triggered by incoming information. This s…

China Sets Ambitious Agenda for AI in High-Level CPC Politburo Study China Sets Ambitious Agenda for AI in High-Level CPC Politburo Study Geopolitechs Apr 26, 2025 12 5 Share The Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held a group study session on Friday afternoon focused on "strengthening the development and regulation of artificial intelligence." The speaker for this Politburo group study session was Professor Zheng Nanning from Xi'an Jiaotong University. Zheng is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and former president of Xi'an Jiaotong University. He initiated the "China Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge," which has been dubbed the "Whampoa Military Academy" of China's autonomous driving and intelligent vehicle research. As early as 1986, Zheng Nanning, together with his master's advisor Professor Xuan Guorong, established the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Xi'an Jiaotong University—the first dedicated research institution for artificial intelligence in China—pioneering AI research and high-level talent cultivation domestically. In 2008, when the National Natural Science Foundation of China launched the major research program on…

Global AI Model Race: Who Leads—US, China, or Europe? In this article Share The US leads in funding and frontier models, China matches performance through speed and efficiency, and Europe shapes the rules everyone must follow. This isn’t a single race with one winner. It’s three competing strategies pushing each other to define how AI will be built and used next. For years, we talked about American dominance like it was a given. OpenAI drops GPT-4, Google releases Gemini, and everyone else scrambles to catch up. That story is over. Right now, in 2026, we're watching something unprecedented. Three different visions of AI are colliding, and each one challenges everything we thought we knew about how this technology should be built. The numbers tell part of the story. The UScranked out 40 notable modelslast year. China produced 15. Europe made three. On paper, it looks like a runaway American victory. Except it's not. Stanford's latest AI Indexreveals something striking: Chinese models have reached near parity with US models on critical benchmarks. On MMLU tests (measuring knowledge and problem-solving) and HumanEval (code generation), the gap has essentially vanished. China is…

China's drive toward self-reliance in artificial intelligence: from chips to ... The race for supremacy in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is now at the forefront of geopolitical competition between China and the United States. Not only is AI expected to reshape the way we live and work, but its potential use in military applications could also alter the global balance of power. And some believe that reaching artificial general intelligence, or AGI, where AI surpasses humans in capability, is akin to the race to build the atomic bomb: whoever unlocks AGI first will be the winner of the geopolitical competition.1The 2022 release of ChatGPT, the first publicly available generative AI tool based on a large language model (LLM) from US company OpenAI, kicked the AI race into high gear. During the Politburo study session of April 2025, focused on AI, China’s party and state leader Xi Jinping urged a nationwide mobilization to achieve “self-reliance and self-strengthening” (自立自强) in the technology by building an “independent and controllable” (自主可控) ecosystem across hardware and software.2The emphasis on AI sovereignty marks a relatively recent turn in Chinese AI strategy and p…

How China Is Using AI To Win Future Wars - Newsweek By Micah McCartney China News Reporter 0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. China is accelerating its push to integrate artificial intelligence into military operations, aiming to gain a decisive edge over the United States in the event of a future Pacific conflict with its strategic rival—such as over Taiwan . U.S. officials warn that Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be capable of moving against the island democracy by 2027. Analysts say Beijing aims to boost the PLA’s capabilities, using AI to enhance battlefield awareness and decision-making, while leveraging advances from civilian sectors into military applications through its well-established civil-military fusion pipeline. Read More on World Experts caution that achievements such as drone swarms could gradually erode U.S. naval and air dominance in the region. Chinese officials insist this modernization is defensive and accuses the U.S. of "hegemonic" interference. But American officials say the …

Chinese Lab's AI LLM Performance Shocks Silicon Valley Chinese Lab's AI LLM Performance Shocks Silicon Valley Get link Facebook X Pinterest Email Other Apps January 26, 2025 A Chinese Lab has sparked panic in Silicon Valley with the release of its first AI model that can outperform America's best despite being built more cheaply and with less-powerful chips, according to the US media reports. The lab called DeepSeek has recently unveiled a free, open-source large-language model (LLM) that it says took only two months and $5.5 million million to build, using reduced-capability chips from Nvidia called H800s. By comparison, the US-based OpenAI's closed LLM model cost $100 million to develop and train using the most advanced H100 chips from Nvidia. Open-source and free DeepSeek models can significantly help developing nations like Pakistan by providing affordable access to the latest AI technology, allowing them to develop solutions tailored to their specific needs without high costs. DeepSeek, a small startup lab in China, has accomplished this feat despite the US technology export controls to slow down China's AI efforts. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now acknowledging that Chi…

Chips, theft and a shutdown: The US-China AI race is turning into a ... Theft. Rivalry. Restrictions. Espionage. And declarations. The US and China artificial intelligence race has all the trappings of a thriller – one that now appears to be coming to a head. Released last month by Beijing-based Z.ai, AI model GLM-5.2 has publicly drawn admiration from Silicon Valley. The surrounding buzz is on the model’s ability to complete complex tasks with minimal prompts and rivals its US counterparts at a fraction of their cost. Some have called it a “mini DeepSeek moment”, a reference to January 2025, when China released the chatbot that took the US-dominated AI industry and markets world-over by surprise. China, it turned out, could develop cutting edge AI without advanced Nvidia chips – on which US’s ChatGPT and Claude rely, and which have deliberately been kept out of Beijing’s reach. Also read:Negotiating AI paradigms GLM-5.2 currently ranks fifth on Artificial Analysis’ intelligence leaderboard and second on Code Arena’s front-end coding rankings, news agency Reuters reported. Z.ai founder Tang Jie told xAI’s Elon Musk on social media that GLM-5.2 was on par with Claude Opus 4.8 …

Chinese AI startup Z.ai targets AGI as GLM-5.2 beats GPT-5.5 and ... Just a week after China’s Z.ai grabbed global attention after itsGLM-5.2 outperformed GPT-5.5 on coding benchmarksat a fraction of the cost, the company said Thursday it plans to use proceeds from a domestic listing to fund its push toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Z.ai, the Chinese AI startup formerly known as Zhipu AI, said Thursday that proceeds from a planned domestic listing will go toward advancing its models toward AGI. The company’s latest model, GLM-5.2, has quickly become a breakout moment for China’s open-source AI push after landing near the top of public leaderboards dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI. “Our mission is to obtain AGI, so right now our focus is on how to improve our model to achieve the upper bound of intelligence. So all these resources are helping us,” said Qinkai Zheng, technical lead of the firm’s CodeGeeX team. The timing matters. Z.ai released GLM-5.2 a day after Anthropic cut off worldwide access to its most advanced models, a move that rattled developers and governments already uneasy about relying too heavily on U.S.-controlled AI infrastructure. In that vacuum, …

A new, inexpensive Chinese AI model is catching up with Anthropic, OpenAI on their home turf <p>Since DeepSeek shocked markets early last year with its cheap but powerful AI model, global consumers have been faced with a choice: Chinese offerings with lower prices and less capability or OpenAI or Anthropic, which have poured ​billions into development.</p> <p>A model called GLM-5.2, launched last month by Beijing-based startup Z.ai, may finally be closing that gap in terms of Western interest.</p> <p>GLM-5.2 has Silicon Valley buzzing with its coding and ‌agent capabilities, or the ability to execute complex tasks with minimal prompting, that almost rival leading US offerings at a fraction of the cost, in what some experts are calling a “mini DeepSeek moment.”</p> <p>It has quickly climbed the usage charts on third-party AI developer platforms like OpenRouter, where it now ranks above Anthropic’s models, while executives from cloud data platform Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have lauded its abilities.</p> <p>“We now have a Chinese open-weight model that is as good as the currently available models ​from OpenAI and Anthropic,” said David Sa…

As the H200 Waits at the Door, China's Domestic Chips Quietly ... 👀As the H200 Waits at the Door, China's Domestic Chips Quietly Step up to Training What’s already happening is Chinese AI labs are increasingly training and serving models on domestic AI chips. Tony Peng May 21, 2026 ∙ Paid 11 1 3 Share During President Trump’s recent state visit to China, NVIDIA’s H200 reportedly cleared the regulatory hurdles to enter the Chinese market, with ten Chinese companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, permitted to buy. Days later, Trump told reporters that China had not actually bought any H200s yet. Whether the H200 ever lands at scale in China is still an open question. What’s already happening is Chinese AI labs are increasingly training and serving models on domestic AI chips. In May 2026, Baidu said a “key version” of its ERNIE 5.1 was trained on its in-house Kunlunxin chips. In April, Meituan’s trillion-parameter LongCat 2.0 was reportedly trained on domestic chips. Separately, two of China’s strongest LLMs, Zhipu’s GLM-5.1 and DeepSeek V4, were adapted to run inference on domestic AI chips. And new hardware keeps coming. While I was writing this post, Alibaba announced its new …

AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so ... - Fortune “Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs. Recommended Video For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth. In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.” Ma, a renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, took her team on the road to get a firsthand look at the country’s AI advancements. She told Fortune that while she isn’t an energy expert, she attended enough meetings and talked to enough insiders to come away with a conclusion that should send chills down the spine of Silicon Valley: In China, building enough power for data centers is no longer up for debate. “This is a stark contrast to the U.S., where AI growth is increasingly tied to debates over data center power consumption and grid limitations,” she wrote on X. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Data center building…

Chinese researchers created a brain-inspired AI that ... - Futura In a move that could reshape how we build and train artificial intelligence, researchers in China have unveiled SpikingBrain, a new model based on how the human brain works. It’s up to 100 times more efficient than conventional systems and does the same job with just a fraction of the training data. Largelanguage modelslike ChatGPT or Gemini are powerful — but they burn through huge amounts of energy and require enormous computing resources. In China, the issue is even more acute due to limited access to Nvidia GPUs, which power most state-of-the-art AI. So, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences decided to try something different. Their solution:SpikingBrain, a system that mimics how biological neurons use electrical impulses to fire. These spiking neural networks (SNNs) don’t waste energy activating an entire system. Instead, each “neuron” fires only when triggered — making it leaner, faster, and far more efficient. The team built two versions ofSpikingBrain: one with 7 billion parameters and another with 76 billion. In testing, the smaller model outpaced traditional AIs by a wide margin. Given a 4-milli…

China's AI Labs Push Domestic Chips Beyond Inference ... byRuchika Saini, AI|Jun 23, 2026 Chinese artificial intelligence models have rapidly narrowed the performance gap with leading U.S. systems, but the country’s hardware ecosystem remains a work in progress. While domestic processors are increasingly used for AI inference, the most computationally demanding stages of model development have historically relied on foreign hardware. That situation is beginning to change as Chinese AI developers experiment with training advanced models on homegrown chips,tells the South China Morning Post. AI development generally involves three stages: pre-training, where a model learns from vast datasets; post-training, which fine-tunes behavior and instruction-following capabilities; and inference, the process of generating responses to user queries. Of these, pre-training requires the greatest computing power and has traditionally depended on Nvidia’s GPUs. Driven by U.S. export controls and China’s push for technological self-reliance, several Chinese companies and research institutions are demonstrating that domestic hardware can support increasingly sophisticated AI workloads. Beijing-ba…

China's AI Push: Embrace Automation, But Don't Fire Workers? May 28, 2026 Alex - aiToggler Team Reviewed by a two-legged human. AI is shaking up the world, but the tension between progress and stability feels especially sharp in China right now. While tech giants in the West are racing to automate everything, China's government is sending a different message to its own companies: go ahead and adopt AI, but don't fire your workers. It's a fascinating, and honestly pretty risky, experiment in managing the social fallout of rapid technological change. The policy: AI, yes, layoffs, no According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng last summer asked the country's largest employers - including tech firms, banks, and carmakers - how AI might impact their workforces. The feedback was blunt: some companies predicted that full-scale AI adoption could eliminate 30% or more of their existing jobs. That's a huge number, and it's not hard to see why Beijing is worried about the social consequences of mass layoffs in a country where stability is a top priority. Rather than letting the market decide, the government is now actively urging companies to fin…

China is building a different kind of AI beyond classic chatbots China is pioneering a distinct AI approach, prioritizing systems for real-time urban, industrial, and logistical coordination over Western chatbot and AGI focus. This strategy emphasizes prediction, management, and continuous adaptation within complex environments. By viewing AI as essential infrastructure, China aims to create intelligent systems that govern movement and respond dynamically to change, reflecting a broader, process-oriented understanding of intelligence.

US vs. China: Who Wins the Critical AI Diffusion Battle? When comparing the United States and China in artificial intelligence, the spotlight is on the development of foundation models. At first glance, America maintains a comfortable numerical lead , producing 40 notable models in 2024 compared to China’s 15. However, looking deeper reveals a more complex story: China’s best models, particularly from DeepSeek, Alibaba (Qwen), and Tencent, have dramatically closed the performance gap on key benchmarks, achieving near parity in capabilities despite using fewer computational resources. Notably, Chinese firms have chosen open-weights strategies, making advanced models like DeepSeek freely accessible, while their American counterparts generally restrict top-tier models behind subscriptions or enterprise licenses. Enjoy what you read? Support us & unlock more! 🤝 However, focusing solely on foundation models risks overlooking a perhaps more critical dimension of the competition: the diffusion of AI capabilities throughout the broader economy. By diffusion, I mean the speed and extent to which AI technologies move beyond elite labs and are adopted by businesses across diverse sectors – t…

How China's AI-Powered Robots Could Reshape the Global Order When Chinese humanoid robots flipped, sparred, and performed martial arts alongside human performers – including children – on national television during the Spring Festival Gala, it was easy to dismiss the “dancing robots” as mere theater. Days later, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s visit to Hangzhou-basedUnitree Roboticsreinforced a far more consequential interpretation: this was not a viral stunt, but an industrial signal. China is trying to shift the global AI race from model performance in the cloud to “embodied intelligence” in the physical economy. The global AI debate still tilts heavily toward “AI in the cloud”: frontier models, compute concentration, software platforms, and winner-take-most dynamics. The United States holdsstructural advantagesin this layer – deep capital markets, hyperscalers, and the gravitational pull of top research labs. But China’s strategic emphasis is increasingly moving toward “AI in steel”: AI systems embedded in machines that sense, move, and adapt in the real world. Just as China’s early electric vehicles were underestimated until scale, supply chains, and iteration ecosystems …

Embodied AI: China's ambitious path to transform its robotics industry At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a major industry event, which took place in January in Las Vegas, physical artificial intelligence (AI) took center stage. In the humanoid robotics section, more than half the exhibitors were from China. Meanwhile, US AI chip giant Nvidia unveiled new foundation models – AI neural networks trained on massive unlabeled datasets to handle a wide variety of tasks – and simulation platforms for AI-powered robotics.1This is a division of labor that could shape the global economy for decades. Key drivers behind China’s robot expansion include a manufacturing chain dominated by automobiles and electronics as these sectors provide easy technical crossovers, plus the economic, social and political pressures of a growing labor shortage, rising labor costs and ambitious state policies aiming to keep entire industrial value chains within China. Physical AI enables autonomous agents to perform complex actions in the real world. For China’s policymakers, this kind of “embodied” (具身)2artificial intelligence (EAI) is an appealing conduit for AI’s “deep integration” (深度融合) in th…

China unveils brain-like AI 100× faster than current models Chinais behinda major announcement in the field of artificial intelligence. Researchers from the country have unveiledSpikingBrain 1.0, described as the first AI that is “similar to the human brain.”Its distinguishing feature is that it can operate up to 100 times faster than current systems and consumes significantly less energy. This innovation reflects the global race for AI technologies and China’s quest for independence. TheSpikingBrain1.0AI was developed by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is a revolutionary development in the way language models process information. AI tools like ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama use a method called “full attention” to compare each word in a sentence with all the others. This innovative Chinese model takes a different approach: it was inspired by the human brain. This means that, instead of processing every detail at once, the new AI focuses on using only the words closest to the immediate context, just as the human brain does when starting or continuing a conversation. This operation is seen as more “localized,” avoiding wasted energy and accelerating response times, re…

Chinese Scientists Claim Brain-Like AI Model Breakthrough 100 Times ... Share Tweet Pin Imagine an AI that doesn’t just act brainy, but actually works in a way that mirrors the human brain. That’s the bold claim coming from a team of Chinese researchers, who say they have built the world’s first truly “brain-like” large language model. The project, called SpikingBrain1.0 , has been presented as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could make powerful models faster, leaner, and less dependent on massive amounts of data. According to The Independent , the scientists behind it argue their system is 25 to 100 times faster than conventional models under certain conditions while requiring only a fraction of the usual training data. Overview of SpikingBrain Most popular AI systems today, like ChatGPT, work by brute force. They are trained on massive amounts of text using supercomputers with powerful GPUs. It works well, but it also costs huge amounts of energy and money. SpikingBrain1.0 tries to work more like a human brain. Instead of analyzing every single piece of input at once, it “fires” only the parts it needs. Think of it like your brain: you don’t process every detail i…