Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are the standouts, but the main question for me is, why is this a war? In their own context China has greatly benefitted from this. They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise.

If this really is a war, trump is kneecapping the country with his lawlessness and eroding America’s good will. If the world cannot trust China with their data and they cannot trust the U.S. to provide good reliable service and not turn it into a mafia style negotiation, then winning the AI war is not helping the U.S. countries as much as it potentially can. It’s probably a good thing for more capable areas like Europe which may develop their own tech stack.

In a weird way because the AI stack is so expensive, China helps the world much more than the U.S. with their really capable open source model.

Article title: “The US is winning the AI Race”

Article content: “The US are capitalizing on AI the best”

A lot of assumptions there that no one can actually verify as true right now. If commercialization into rent-seeking SaaS landscapes is the endgame, then yeah, the US is winning the AI race. If individualization, local LLMs, and consumer hardware are the endgame, China is winning the AI race. If it’s something entirely different - if LLMs are the wall and research is what grants the next breakthrough, or if compute and memory requirements take a dive, or whatever; then we have no idea who’s winning the race because that stuff is mostly happening behind closed doors.

No, the US is _leading_ the AI race, but the race isn't over.

What's the point of leading the race for 90% of it, if they're gonna slip on their own sweat and fall down by the end? In non metaphorical terms, what's the point of spending billions of dollars rushing to get the best AI tech at all costs, when the competition can distil your progress and catch up in 6-12 months while only spending 1% of what you spent.

Even in the aspect the article cares about, commercialization, the US is starting to lose marketshare, I've seen people move from cc/codex plans to use glm/opencode plans due to the recent squeeze the US companies put on plan usage, the US companies are screwed if that sticks, not everyone needs the bleeding edge models, they just want to pay $20/month and have the models be decently capable.

I don't think so. From a nation state perspective, AI is a munition. Every advanced nation is going to have their own cyber division with their own AI hosted within its borders. Considering how xenophobic and belligerent the US is, nobody is going to want their national cyber defenses hosted in the US.

On a personal level, I simply do not trust the US anymore. I won't host any of my personal data in a US company. I don't want the US govt invading my personal privacy, and their corporations are constantly leaking and selling private data. I consider US to be rapidly approaching complete autocracy (on par with China) so US-hosted AI is a non-starter. And let's not forget local inference keeps getting more efficient, with higher context and TPS in the same amount of RAM. Within a year even small consumer machines will run local models good enough for basic coding, and in 3 years RAM prices will lower and everyone will be able to afford a decent rig.

Finally, open weight models are now good enough for daily work. They may never be as good as SOTA (SOTA will just keep increasing indefinitely), but that doesn't matter; my car may not be as fast as a Porsche but it still gets me to the grocery store and back. So I use non-US hosted model providers which provide open weights, which are both significantly cheaper than Anthropic/OpenAI, and actually allow me to use my subscriptions without a moat.

But yes, Anthropic/OpenAI are absolutely the new Oracle. They will win for US govt and Enterprise contracts. But that's far from the only users of AI.

One interesting thing that Anthropic did was putting their stack on the various cloud providers, I wonder if they'll put it on GCP and Azure next since they've put it into AWS first at a level we have not seen a major AI provider do to date. Your company can have their own Claude stack just like an ELK stack on your cloud, if they can do this for both Azure and GCP then OpenAI has to really catch up.

In my eyes I would rather use the AI I can run on my own paid infrastructure, so if there's an outage its isolated, or I could potentially have a different region / DC to fallback on.

I'm still surprised that neither Microsoft nor Amazon have made their own models available on their cloud offerings. I guess Microsoft probably does have Phi on there, but it's not front and center, especially with something like Copilot for Devs (seriously Microsoft rebrand that damn thing to be clear what you mean by Copilot!) where they could use the cheaper compute by using something like Phi.

Flagged for AI content: I hope this submission dies and the user is penalized (look at their submission and comment history!), because IMO the article does not belong on the front page. Quick polemic:

>The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

If you ask me, one could name different criteria for winning, and commercialization would not be the first thing to come to my mind:

https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202604/15/content_WS69df29e6...

https://fortune.com/2026/05/03/chinese-court-layoffs-workers...

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-moves-regulate-dig...

> It also owns platforms that generate and organize the data of the AI age. YouTube is a video corpus. Google Drive and Microsoft 365 sit inside daily office work. GitHub sits inside software development.

Yeah, okay. China does not have any platforms nor data.

I feel like the much simpler explanation is that the US is winning because it's dumping the most money into it. By a very large margin.

The US has destroyed the PC market perhaps irrevocably, and made getting small single-board-computers for new products extraordinarily difficult. It's enraged its own populus with skyrocketing energy prices causing wild consumer shock. It's waged a trade war over chips that has lead China to develop their own, which they have done astoundingly quickly with phenomenal success, far far faster than anyone could have guessed.

As with another recent example, sometimes in war there is no winning: just loss. This is obviously for us programmers an incredible and wild age, filled with nothing short of miracles. It's incredible. But the prices we are paying, the extreme tensions we are creating, the stress and strain of this all has been incredibly unpleasant, and very very very few people feel like they are seeing upsides to this worrisome menacing age, that promises very few people on the planet anything better coming, and which. Has already made life considerably worse, which no nation has yet directed towards helping its people.

> where it matters most: commercialization.

It begs the question because both its premise and assertion are already wrong. Has AI improved the industrial capacity of the US in order to improve the lives of its citizens? No it hasn't. Has AI increased the wealth of its citizens by being able to do laundry or any household task in a generalized way? No it hasn't. The only thing it's really done is make very narrow slices of white-collar work more fungible. In what way has AI been able to address existing shortcomings of the US?

Alibaba's cloud is something that the author of this article seems to dismiss. It's being used massively in Asia and they're pretty close in services and offerings to what AWS, GCP and Azure provides. Once they start doing inference on their own custom chips it might be hard to compete with them due to the energy costs

It’s certainly too early to call (if you must view this as some sort of adversarial competition). The US is behind on local models, the future for anyone who cares about privacy. There may be step change innovation yet to come that completely shifts the landscape. There’s basically no switching costs to users to change models. They have no lock-in.

I'm glad we went to space, truly. Racing the USSR might have been the wrong reason but it got us there. We've benefited immensely as a species from exploring the solar system and looking deep into the universe.

I'm not certain that racing China in AI is the right reason but it might get us... somewhere.

I feel like the title of this post should have "for now" appended.

How about the obesity and fall of democracy race?

The whole "race" narrative is silly. It is all built on the assumption that one country (corporation, actually) somehow creates AGI and thus, essentially, the singularity. Great for raising VC, apparently, but at its core this is magical thinking.

Even if any of the US corporations would eventually end up in a scenario where their revenue is at least as high as their inference cost, what harm would that do to the other contenders? It's not as if there is any kind of network effect here that would exlude them from market participation.

This sounds like an ad for US than anything else.

Does any of the US companies earn money on LLMs? No, they bleed money. Github Copilot is switching to token based pricing, which will be costlier than hiring juniors.

Anthropic also is switching enterprises to token based pricing from their subscription one.

From the big three only Codex is still in somekind of subscription pricing, but they'll shift eventually (usage limits are a kind of that, but they have them less stricter than Claude ones)

There is one winner in this race - China. Trump with his agendas and wars makes it even more likely that China will lead this new market.

> Trump fits this moment well. He is a salesman at core, and Larry Ellison is too.

Larry just fired 30% of his people at Oracle because, apparently, he is in an immediate need for cash. Because Oracle's early AI bets aren't paying off.

Hopefully it's a race worth winning and not a race to global disaster.

It's a race straight to the bottom. Anyone who gets excited about being a more efficient and productive corporate wage slave that gets to train their future AI replacement is either a shill or not very intelligent.

I mean you can argue the same about Telsa, but look at BYD now.

Just because you are first to do x, doesn't mean you are going to be the winner.

This is patently absurd. US AI companies are investing non-existent money on huge infrastructure with negligible income. This cannot be sustained. And if/when it fails it will take down the economy of the US and probably any other country touching us business.

GLM, Kimi, MiMo, Minimax, Deepseek, Qwen would like to have a word. :)

> Winning the AI Race

Which one of them all?

If you mean "building models that are very good at coding and as substitutes for search engines", then yeah, sure.

But if you mean: "applying AI to industrial applications and robotics", then China is far ahead: https://time.com/7382151/china-dominates-the-physical-ai-rac...

What does the term "AI race" even mean, beyond wooing clueless VCs and soon retail investors ? It's not like the LLMs are some super-secret technology. Any economy willing to sink in copious amounts of money and resources can get it to some level - the question, what's the actual payoff? We have yet to see anything really useful, on the level of step change, besides Johnny who can now spin up demo projects quicker.

> The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization.

puke

Yeah, go ahead and run your country into the ground because of hypercapitalism and hypercommercialization, you're almost at the end game now! While the rest of us try to figure out how to actually build societies worthwhile to live in and experience, with healthcare and not waging war on our neighbors.

I don't know how people can seriously publish stuff like this and not feel like they're actively trying to make the world worse. Is money really the single thing y'all can focus on? Is there nothing better in life you can chase, even if it's also a number? So sad to see stuff like this.

so much winning https://layoffs.fyi/

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much"

Yes, and it's doing so primarily because of immigrant nerds, H1B's and F1 bros who chose America and may not have this avenue in the future. Potentially, making this the last race USA wins.

The whole country? Really?

As an American, we may be winning this race but we are still struggling to define why this is the race to win.

The cost of winning this race has been telling our citizen s we will replace them with robots and there is no hope for their children’s future employment.

The cost has been destroying trust as we tell citizens water and power should go to server farms and not them.

The cost has been naked power telling democracy it’s wrong and dying

I think when we discover the limits of LLM tech and tally its benefits over its cost — we may regret this win.

But don’t let me contradict a bunch of fake techno oligarchs wrapping themselves in war like patriotism to get the investments they need to keep this going.

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