When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it.Chinese start-up DeepSeek recently made headlines with the release of its latest AI large language model, prompting much handwringing in the United States as policymakers and technology leaders expressed concern that China might be surging ahead in commercial AI competition. Looking beyond the immediate headlines and social media debates, we asked four experts to offer their views on the state of U.S.-China commercial AI development race and what it means for national security.Read more below.Vivek Chilukuri Senior Fellow and Director, Technology and National Security Program, Center for a New American SecurityThe release of DeepSeek-R1 has humbled those who predicted that China was years behind America at the AI frontier. R1 shows comparable abilities to OpenAI’s o1 model — trained at a fraction of the cost — even if it lags behind the more advanced o3 model. DeepSeek achieved this through dramatic improvements in algorithmic efficiency — underscoring both the talent in China’s rapidly maturing AI ecosystem and the necessity of relying on this development pathway given its restricted access to advanced AI chips.If the United States and its partners better enforce export controls and scale up and secure computing infrastructure and sensitive intellectual property at home, China will likely struggle to keep pace through algorithmic improvements alone. AI models require significant compute not only to train but to use. Limited computing infrastructure in China due to inadequate or increasingly outdated chips will limit AI adoption and usage while widening performance gaps with U.S. counterparts.Zach Beecher Partner & Head of Growth, America’s Frontier FundAI is set to transform the world, accelerating innovation from