The stranglehold of export control did not succeed.
The State of AI report: China Q2 2025 [1] by the analytical company Artificial Analysis recently confirmed the unfortunate words spoken by one individual in the world of 'hardware' for AI, Jensen Huang, that 'the US export control has indeed failed.'
China has caught up with the USA in the most powerful AI in the world (the left 2 diagrams in the attached picture) and surpassed it with the most powerful AIs with open weights (the right 2 diagrams).
The history of this race is as follows.
• In the fall of 2022, the USA, in the struggle against China for supremacy in AI, 'changed judo to Brazilian jiu-jitsu' [2]. The USA identified 35 key 'technologies of a stranglehold' capable of killing the future of any country in the 21st century. And #1 on this list of technologies was AI.
• That same fall, in response to the USA's most terrifying stranglehold move - export control on advanced chips and equipment for their production - China did not respond like the USSR or Russia. Instead of import substitution, the Chinese leadership decided on scientific and technological self-empowerment [3].
• A year later, in the fall of 2023, seeing that the gap between the USA and China was narrowing, the USA took an unprecedented step. They announced such strict new export control rules that it was no longer a 'stranglehold' but a blow to the head with a sledgehammer [4].
• But already by the beginning of 2024, having created over 150 of its own models and releasing 40 of them to the market for wide application through state verification, China reduced its lag behind the USA to several months [5].
• And at the beginning of 2025, China used the breakthrough of the AI computational paradigm with DeepSeek to get ahead in the AI race. This, along with the 'strategy of large battalions', allowed China to reduce its lag behind the USA by 30 times in 1.5 years [6].
The release of DeepSeek R1-0528 in May led to the situation shown in the diagrams.
Now it remains only to wonder where DeepSeek would be if it had the same free access to 'hardware' as its American competitors.
And will there be more after the already training DeepSeek R2.
However, the sages from Rand claim that this will help China [7]. But how can we know, since they also wrote about the 'cozy grip' of export control. And look how it turned out.
