61% vs. 26%: The number behind the real US-China AI divide

Editor's note: Tian Feng is the dean of Thinking Fast and Slow Research Institute, an independent AI think tank.

The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

In a factory outside Shenzhen, a two-legged robot leans over an assembly line and picks up a car door hinge, its knee joints whining faintly with every squat.

Halfway around the world, in a converted warehouse south of San Francisco's Market Street, a dozen engineers stare silently at a screen full of falling numbers – a "loss curve," the holy chart of machine learning.

Both scenes are called artificial intelligence (AI).

Neither looks much like the other.

That gap has just been measured, not guessed at.

In August, the US-based think tank RAND Corporation's Center on AI, Security, and Technology published a detailed headcount of the US and Chinese AI industries: 1,181 companies – 743 American and 438 Chinese – sorted by what each firm actually builds, sells and patents.

The headline number is simple.

Sixty-one percent of American AI firms are pure software shops.

Only 26% of Chinese firms are.

The rest are busy building bodies – robots, cars, drones – for their algorithms to live in.

Twins at birth, strangers by adulthood Here's the twist RAND's researchers did not expect: on almost everything except that one number, the two industries look like siblings.

Roughly 28% of US firms and 27% of Chinese firms build on the transformer architecture, the same family of neural networks behind ChatGPT and DeepSeek alike.