US vs China: why AI is pitting the two superpowers against each other?
The race to lead artificial intelligence has become a geopolitical battle. While US giants bet on the most advanced and closed models, Beijing tries to extend its technological influence with open and cheaper systems.
China is gaining ground in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, with its open-source models becoming increasingly popular due to their lower costs and comparable capabilities to those of US-based companies. According to OpenRouter, Chinese AI models surpassed US models in global usage in June, and another aggregator, Hugging Face, reported that Chinese models accounted for more downloads than US models in February 2026.
Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Alibaba are offering models at significantly lower prices, with some costing 60-90% less than those of US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. The shift towards open-source models is changing the AI landscape, with experts predicting that the future of AI lies in specialized agents working together rather than large, powerful models.
Written by urgent.news from Expansion ES's report — not a translation of it. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
