IFP report: US AI lead over China is only ~6 months, could double it via two policies
fiiiiiist · x · 2026-10-20
The Institute for Progress (IFP) published a 23,000-word research report on US-China AI competition (authors include Georgia Adamson and Konstantin Pilz). The team spent six months examining how Chinese AI companies' access to compute and distillation of American models shape the capabilities gap, and shipped an interactive analytical model that visualizes how the US lead changes under different policy interventions.
Key findings:
- The current US AI lead over China is only about 6 months;
- Using authorities already available to the federal government, the US could roughly double that lead to over a year;
- Paths include closing the remote-access loophole for compute and enabling collaborative execution of performant counter-distillation strategies;
- On chips, China's accessible AI chip capacity is set to roughly double (original text truncated).
The author notes that a country's influence over the future rarely hinges so much on just two narrow policy choices.
Related event: IFP Report: US Leads China in AI by Only About Six Months(5 posts)→
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