Ashish Bhatia argues the US and China are no longer in a single winner-take-all AI race but operate as a “duopoly” with distinct competitive advantages, noting Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8-Max now rival American frontier systems. He breaks the competition down by layer: China leading in energy infrastructure and manufacturing, the US dominating cloud infrastructure and coding tools, and suggests the next major battleground will be physical AI and robotics.
