In 2017, Xi Jinping presented to the world his ambitious plan to convert China world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. Its aspirations, to stop being “the factory of the world” to become a technological superpowerseemed then a chimera.
Eight years later, the Asian giant leads by a wide margin in patent applications for generative AIaccording to UN data, and last year published 23,695 scientific research on AI, more than USAthe European Union and the United Kingdom together, reveals a study by the analytical firm Digital Science.
Last January, a then unknown Chinese start-up, DeepSeeksurprised everyone and everyone by launching a great language model that not only equaled and even surpassed the most powerful ones, developed in USAbut he did it with much less money and without needing the technology more advanced. China was experiencing its “Sputnik moment” and was so revealing the fragility of American hegemony that even the president Donald Trump warned that the Chinese rise was a “wake-up call.”
Although Silicon Valley still designs most of the world’s most advanced AI, the balance of power is shifting. Beijing has managed to challenge American dominance and already surpasses its great rival in an area that may be crucial for the future: IA of open source. He overtaking of DeepSeek goes beyond being a simple anecdote and demonstrates, in the words of the influential tycoon Eric Schmidtformer CEO of Google, “how quickly the tables can turn on technological supremacy.”
“DeepSeek indicates how quickly the tables can turn on technological supremacy”
Private models, the success of the US
The US maintains its leadership in the field of IA in the strength of their Big Tech —Google, Microsoft, Amazon o Meta—, the most powerful private industry in the world, leading innovation centers and a venture capital ecosystem that is watering its ambitions and that of rising firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic o xAI with hundreds of billions of dollars. From there, are born the chatbots or tools generative AI The most popular are closed, paid models whose operation is controlled only by their owners. The vast majority of these business colossi opt for this walled garden, wary of sharing their formula for success in order to exploit it in search of greater economic benefits.
The president Donald Trump has embraced that vision and is trying to promote the expansion of its national industry at all costs through a drastic cut in the regulation and the imposition of a trade war —from the duty to the blockade of the exports of chips— that seeks to paralyze the Chinese rise. However, it is also making it harder to hire foreign talent and cutting funding for universities. “USA is doing everything possible to undermine its own technological leadership,” warns the economic historian Carl Benedikt Frey.
Larry Ellison, along with Trump, Masayoshi Son (Softbank) and Sam Altman (OpenAI), during an event at the White House on January 21. / AARON SCHWARTZ / POOL / EFE
Open models, China’s opportunity
China has an opportunity and wants to take advantage of it by taking the opposite path. Throughout 2025, Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance —owner of TikTok—, DeepSeek o Tencent have launched open models whose source code or training data is publicly available. In practice, that means that anyone can download the model to their computeraudit and modify its innards and create new applications on that base layer. Plus, in most cases they are free. That recipe – which Google has already used to conquer the mobile phone market – smartphones con Android— could now serve for Beijing to strengthen its technological influence.
He Chinese Communist Party maintains tight control of interneta surveillance and censorship system known as the Great Firewall and that had limited the Chinese digital ecosystem to operating within its borders. The regime has embraced open source as a country strategy to avoid these restrictions and make it easier for their companies—and, therefore, their worldview—to have a global impact. “China is willing to share its experience in the development of AI and its technological products to help countries around the world, especially those in the Global South,” the Chinese prime minister explained in July, Li Qiangduring the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, a congress that has served as a showcase to present itself as a global leader in responsible AI.
The brilliant takeoff of DeepSeek has opened the floodgates to other Chinese companies and universities, which since the beginning of the year have rushed to create new free and open source AI solutions. Aware of its opportunity, Beijing is trying to close the gap that separates it from leadership with an aggressive adoption of these systems in more and more branches of the Government, both national and local, as well as in hospitals or educational centers in the country.
The tactic is supported by the population, the most techno-optimistic in the world with 83% favorable to AI, according to the latest AI Index Report from Stanford University. And, with more than 1,400 million inhabitants, access to large oceans of data It is crucial to continue improving AI capabilities and definitively unseat the US from the top of the podium.
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