The pervasive indifference that characterizes America’s overconfident view of its place in the AI race stems from grading the Sino-American AI race against our own preferred rubric: frontier model benchmarks, the scale of the data center buildout, and timelines to artificial general intelligence (AGI). Rarely do we measure American performance against the categories that the Chinese themselves choose to emphasize. The party-state and various Chinese companies are clearly trying to unleash AI capabilities, and Beijing’s desire for international AI leadership is beyond dispute. But their methods and benchmarks of success are different from ours, evincing a fundamentally distinct understanding of the nature of the competition…

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