The gap between China and the United States in the race for artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly narrow, with both nations possessing distinct strengths and maintaining leading positions globally, said Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate in Economics.
China's economic structural transformation has shifted the country from a supplier to a competitor in meeting international market demands, particularly for developed nations that previously led in high-tech and advanced manufacturing sectors.
In an interview with China Media Group (CMG), Spence, also a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, said that China is ahead of the rest of the world in some areas, and catching up quickly in others, including AI.
"One, the gap between China and the United States has been closing very rapidly. It depends on which technology you look at. So, if you look at the kind of green technologies, China is clearly in the lead both with respect to the technology and cost. If you look at Gen AI models, it's very close," he said.
AI is undoubtedly the hottest topic in global technological innovation and is regarded as a focal point of competition between China and the U.S.
Leaders of top American companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, AMD and Nvidia, all agree that the race is extremely intense.
According to the AI Index Report, an annual publication by Stanford University, China and the U.S. each possess distinct strengths in specific areas.
In 2024, the report said, U.S.-based institutions produced 40 notable AI models, compared to China's 15. While the U.S. maintains its lead in quantity, Chinese models have rapidly closed the quality gap: performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024. Meanwhile, China continues to lead in AI publications and patents.
"Another trend that's important, and China is centrally important, is the expanding area of open-source Gen AI models. So that being that significant because we're going to get a mix of these closed and open models and the global marketplace will decide. But it certainly increases the accessibility of these technologies to a much wider range of countries that can't be in the business of developing. It's just too expensive," he said.
"I think it's obvious that China and the United States are the main, the dominant developers of these technologies because the infrastructure and scale and talent requirements are so large. At this point, the two countries are really the only plausible players. That could change in the future. Europe could change direction. India, at some point, will be big enough as an economy to be a major player in this. So it's not a permanent condition, but it is kind of where we are right now," said Spence.
China-US gap in AI race is closing: Nobel laureate
The winners of the 2026 World Laureates Foundation Prize (WLF Prize) were announced in Shanghai on Thursday, with a total of 11 scientists honored, the most in the award's history, following the introduction of a new prize category.
Established in 2021, the WLA Prize is an international science award recognizing exceptional individuals in the fields of computer science, mathematics, life science or medicine.
Ingrid Daubechies of Duke University won the 2026 WLF Prize in Computer Science or Mathematics for her major contributions to applied harmonic analysis, wavelet theory and image compression, as well as her leadership in the international mathematics community.
Yuan Junying of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Wang Xiaodong and Shao Feng of the National Institute of Biological Sciences, and Vishva Dixit at Genentech Inc. won the 2026 WLF Prize in Life Science or Medicine.
They shared the award for elucidating the molecular pathways of distinct forms of programmed cell death and analyzing how those pathways govern diverse physiological functions and disease pathogenesis.
Shao was the first Chinese national to win the award.
The prize introduced a new category this year. Six young scientists under 40 won the WLF Prize for Young Scientists.
The winners are: Raphaele Juliette Clement from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research for advances in solid-state systems for electrochemical energy storage and conversion; Chen Peining from Fudan University for contributions to flexible electronic materials and devices; Ding Shiqian from Tsinghua University for experimental achievements in nuclear quantum precision measurement; Wu Jiajun from Stanford University for work on embodied AI and world models; Xie Weidi from Shanghai Jiao Tong University for AI applications in rare disease diagnosis and treatment; and Zhuang Ziquan from Johns Hopkins University for fundamental contributions to K-stability and birational geometry.
While spotlighting frontier breakthroughs in basic science, this year's prize selection also actively focused on the development of disruptive technologies and the application of innovative achievements.
"The WLF Prize also encourages important contributions to theories. Many applications we see today may stem from mathematics developed decades or even a century ago. So there should be greater investments in this area, which will provide more important safeguards for the development of our large models in industrial applications, safety, and other aspects," said Hua Xiansheng, executive dean of the Institute of Engineering Intelligence, Tongji University.
The 2026 prize was organized by the WLF, with exclusive prize funding from Hongshan and support from the Shanghai Lingang Science and Technology Innovation and Development Foundation.
The formal award presentation will take place during the World Laureates Forum scheduled for Oct 30 to Nov 1 in Shanghai.
China unveils winners of prize for global scientists
