China is increasingly keeping its best AI talent to itself

The AI race between the East and the West is closer than it’s ever been. Stanford’s latest index shows the performance gap between the top U.S. and Chinese models had shrunk to just 2.7% as of March 2026, from about 31% in 2023, raising fresh questions about how long America can hold its lead.

The U.S. still dominates in terms of model quality and high-impact patents, but China is fast catching up if not outpacing American AI labs, in publications, citations, and patent volume.

In addition to travel restrictions, China reportedly plans to keep a check on U.S. capital flowing into its top AI firms, requiring government sign-off before tech companies like Moonshot AI, StepFun, and ByteDance can accept American capital, Bloomberg reported in April.

The news of travel restrictions follows a series of escalating economic countermeasures: In 2025, Beijing imposed two rounds of export controls on 14 rare earth materials critical to high-tech military manufacturing, and separately barred state-funded data centers from deploying foreign AI chips.