\$109 billion in 2024

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Council on Foreign Relations·cfr.org/article/china-united-states-and-ai-race

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A CFR policy analysis relevant to AI governance researchers tracking geopolitical competition in AI; useful background for understanding how US-China rivalry shapes global AI development and safety coordination prospects.

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Importance: 45/100news articleanalysis

Summary

A Council on Foreign Relations analysis examining the competitive dynamics between China and the United States in artificial intelligence development, with the $109 billion figure referring to U.S. AI investment in 2024. The piece explores how the two superpowers are competing across AI capabilities, infrastructure, and policy.

Key Points

•The U.S. invested approximately $109 billion in AI in 2024, reflecting the scale of the Sino-American AI competition.
•The article examines strategic dimensions of the US-China AI race including military, economic, and technological implications.
•Governance and policy responses from both nations shape the trajectory of AI development globally.
•Competition in compute, chips, and AI infrastructure is central to the geopolitical rivalry.
•The piece situates AI competition within broader great-power rivalry and national security frameworks.

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## By experts and staff

PublishedOctober 10, 2025 12:17 p.m.

### Experts

- [By Michael Froman](https://www.cfr.org/experts/michael-froman)



President, Council on Foreign Relations


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China might have become the manufacturing floor for the global economy, but the West has taken some comfort from the assessment that the United States retains the lead when it comes to the quest for artificial intelligence (AI). That might depend, however, on how one defines the competition.

The United States tends to define it in terms of the race toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that is, self-improving artificial intelligence which surpasses the cognitive power of human beings and is capable of executing real-world knowledge work tasks.By Trump’s AI czar David Sacks’ [estimate](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-is-only-3-6-months-behind-us-ai-trump-official-says-2025-06-10/ "estimate"), “China is not years and years behind us in AI. Maybe they’re three to six months,” but no one can really be certain—what that means, whether that’s true, and whether it really matters.

For one, how will we know when AGI has been achieved? The point at which AI crosses over into AGI, as models of ever-increasing sophistication are developed, might not be obvious.

Second, does it matter? If both the United States and China are going to achieve AGI, maybe as little as six months apart, does it matter who gets there first—other than to feed the vanity of the entrepreneur who achieves that milestone? What is going to happen in that period to position the winning country in a categorically different situation than otherwise might be the case?

And that leads to the third question: Are we, the United States, racing toward the wrong finish line? Indeed, we assume we are in a neck-to-neck race with China, but they might be racing on an entirely different course.

If the measure of success is building the biggest, most beautiful model, the United States is doing quite well. As U.S. firms invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the latest models, chips, and AI infrastructure, I was comforted to read the National Institute for Standards and Technology’s new [AI benchmarking report](https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2025/09/caisi-evaluation-deepseek-ai-models-finds-shortcomings-and-risks "AI benchmarking report"), which found that the best U.S. model outperformed the best Chinese mode

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