The US federal government can double this lead to 13 months using authorities already available today. The report suggests the Bureau of Industry and Security should restrict China's remote access to training clusters abroad and the DOJ and FTC should create a safe harbor for US firms to coordinate against adversarial distillation. Such policies would increase US cyberdefensive advantages and provide domestic AI companies more time to prioritize safety R&D without the risk of being overtaken.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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Adversarial Distillation Halves US AI Lead Over China to 6 Months
AI1 day ago
Researchers from the Institute for Progress found that the US maintains a competitive edge in artificial intelligence that is far smaller than its hardware advantage would suggest. While the US possesses roughly 16x the training compute of China, the use of adversarial distillation to copy American models has reduced the resulting capabilities gap to approximately 6 to 6.5 months. China's access to AI chips will roughly double over the next year, and overseas data centers will account for about half of the country's compute by 2027.
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