China's Rapid AI Progress Narrows Performance Gap With US, But Geopolitical Sway Remains Uncertain

China's advances in artificial intelligence are narrowing the technological gap with the United States at an accelerating pace, yet experts remain skeptical whether technical prowess will translate into genuine geopolitical leverage. As Xi Jinping prepares to visit Washington, Chinese AI models are directly competing with American counterparts for dominance on key benchmarks. The performance differential has collapsed to just 2.7 percent as of March 2026, down from a 17 to 31 percentage-point lead the US maintained in mid-2023. DeepSeek-R1, a Chinese model, briefly matched the top American model in February 2025, a milestone that would have seemed impossible years earlier given US restrictions on advanced chip exports.