America needs to stop getting shocked by Chinese AI

People visit the booth of Kimi, an LLM developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot, during the World AI Conference in Shanghai, China, Monday, July 20, 2026.

| Image: LONG WEI/ Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images Last week, two Chinese AI companies unveiled models they say can credibly compete with the best systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. The response was swift and predictable.