IFP report: US lead over China in AI is only about 6 months
fiiiiiist · x · 2026-10-20
A 23k-word report from the Foreign Policy research institute (IFP), based on 6 months of original research, examines how Chinese AI companies' compute access and distillation of American models translate into the current US-China capabilities gap, with an interactive model visualizing the US lead under different policy interventions.
Key findings:
- The US AI lead over China is currently only 6 months.
- Using authorities already available to the federal government, the US could roughly double that lead to over a year.
- China's access to AI chips will roughly double.
- The report also tackles whether distillation actually buys China much, why chip controls still matter, and what the administration can do without Congress.
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