The U.S. still leads in producing top AI models—but China is closing the performance gap.

In 2024, U.S.-based institutions produced 40 notable AI models, significantly outpacing China’s 15 and Europe’s three. While the U.S. maintains its lead in quantity, Chinese models have rapidly closed the quality gap: performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024. Meanwhile, China continues to lead in AI publications and patents. At the same time, model development is increasingly global, with notable launches from regions such as the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. - The 2025 AI Index Report, Stanford University