China is having another AI moment

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Source: The Economist
This is a summary/commentary on the original article. 

The original article is available to subscribers at The Economist.

China is rapidly narrowing America’s lead in frontier AI, with Zhipu’s GLM 5.2 emerging as one of the strongest Chinese models yet. It reportedly approaches leading American systems in capability while being openly released and advertised at far lower per-token prices, making Chinese models increasingly attractive to companies worried about the high cost or political restrictions attached to American AI. 
However, benchmark results suggest the US still retains a meaningful lead—perhaps 7–12 months on harder private evaluations—and Chinese models may look better on public tests than they perform on unseen tasks. Their apparent cost advantage is also less clear than advertised: models such as DeepSeek often use far more tokens to solve the same problem, so their total cost per completed task can equal or exceed American models. 
China’s strengths are therefore increasingly capability, openness and accessibility, while its weaknesses remain limited access to advanced chips, lower computational efficiency, service-capacity constraints and weaker performance on some open-ended reasoning tasks. 
The broader strategic danger for American firms is that government restrictions on access to US models could push international users toward Chinese open-source alternatives, meaning the AI competition is becoming not simply a contest over who has the smartest model, but over cost, openness, reliability and geopolitical control.

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