How China is betting that cheap AI will wow the world with its technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) is at a very Chinese stage of life. Recent moves by Chinese AI labs challenge the dominance of American “frontier labs” like Google and OpenAI.

Last week, ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, released an AI video generation tool called Seedance 2.0 that creates high-quality movie-like clips from text prompts while casually ignoring copyright concerns. This week Anthropic, the US company behind chatbot Claude, said three Chinese AI labs had created thousands of fake accounts to collect Claude’s responses in a practice called “distillation” that could be used to improve AI models.

These events have led to speculation that China may be gaining the upper hand in the battle for AI supremacy. So is China winning the “AI race”?

Cheap, widely available tools

While most advanced frontier models are still made by American companies, China is pushing hard to develop cheap, widely used AI tools that…