The US-China competition is not just over scale and price but also over the very nature of AI models. It's clear the Chinese AI labs are remarkably capable in building near-frontier models," says Ryan Fedasiuk, of the American Enterprise Institute. Last month, China's Z.ai launched GLM 5.2, an AI model that fell not far short of American leader Claude Opus 4.8. At the start of 2025, Chinese tech firm DeepSeek released its open-source AI model R1 and revealed just how quickly China's tech bros were closing in on Silicon Valley. Open-source AI models are cheap and easy to run, so demand is running hot.