Eric Schmidt says gap between China and US in AI is now negligible

Eric Schmidt thinks the AI race between the US and China is much closer than Washington would like. In May 2026, the former Google CEO said China’s leading AI models now trail top US systems by under six months. In 2025, that gap was estimated at one to two years. That is a lot of ground to make up in roughly a year. It is even more striking because China did it while US restrictions cut off access to advanced American chips. A gap measured in nanoseconds Schmidt, who now chairs the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), did not soften the assessment. He described the remaining difference in AI development timelines as negligible, measured in “nanoseconds.” Schmidt cautioned that those controls are beginning to fail in their intended purpose. Schmidt credited the catch-up to software innovation and workarounds that keep Chinese models competitive on weaker hardware. He specifically pointed to models like DeepSeek as examples of that approach. Not just one man’s opinion Schmidt is not alone in landing on the six-month figure. Independent analyses in mid-to-late 2026 also put the US lead in frontier AI models at approximately six months. A report from the Institute for Progress ...