Strategic AI competition

Frontier AI treated as a matter of national power.

Facts

Lane: Security and geopolitics
Wave: 4 of 12 (build order, not a date)
Needs: 7 boxes all the way back through hard links
Unlocks: 2 boxes downstream through hard links
Leverage: 0.3 points · stands in the way of 1 of 53 stages · rank 31 of 57
Cluster: Compute governance and geopolitics
When: Here since 2022

Evidence as of October 2026

Every model at the frontier of Epoch’s capability index since 2023 came from the US, with Chinese models about seven months behind on average, ranging from four to 14 months.

01Epoch AI: Chinese models have lagged the US frontier by 7 months

Watch
Lag between US and Chinese frontier models: about seven months on average.

Timeline note
US chip export controls to China began in October 2022.

Around it

Needs · 2

Pretraining at scalecapability · Built today
Export controlscapability · Built today · helps, not required

Unlocks · 5

Compute deterrencecapability · Speculative
Government AGI projectstage · Speculative
Military AI and autonomystage · Emerging · helps, not required
China critical-mineral export controlsbrake · Built today · helps, not required
US ban on foreign-made robots and dronesbrake · Built today · helps, not required

Loops and off-ramps

Cyber offence and defencereinforcing loop
Decoupling escalationreinforcing loop
Capex pullbackoff-ramp · cut off
Taiwan chip disruptionoff-ramp · cut off
Power shortfalloff-ramp · cut off
Training data ruled outoff-ramp · slowed

Openings researchers' judgement, October 2026 scouting

Startup room 25/100 · rank 118 of 124 Research room 24/100 · rank 121 of 124

Crowding5 Lab overlap5 Small-team fit2 Buyer today3 Research openness2

Depth: light
Players: US DOE/DoD; CSET; RAND; CNAS; IAPS; SCSP
Wedge: Quantitative net assessment of the US-China capability, compute and diffusion gap; commentary is saturated. research

01NPR: Pentagon labels Anthropic supply chain risk