The frontier AI race · Public evidence
West leads the measured frontier. China leads the open frontier.
The path to AGI is now an ecosystem competition, not a single-company story. We track the strongest Western and Chinese systems, who is closing the gap, and where open weights change the balance.
Current composite frontier
Western lead: 8.7 ECI
ECI frontier history
The gap is real. The direction is not settled.
Highest dated Epoch Capabilities Index score in each ecosystem at year end. The comparison begins when both ecosystems have a scored model.
Benchmark interpreter
Ask what a score means before deciding what it proves.
Get a plain-language answer grounded in this site’s methodology and latest evidence snapshot. The model explains the record; it cannot change the race score.
Two plausible paths
The winner depends on what kind of race this becomes.
If scale and proprietary systems decide it…
The Western ecosystem holds today’s measured edge, with OpenAI and Anthropic occupying the top three deduplicated ECI positions.
GPT-6 Astra · 166.3 ECIIf replication and open weights decide it…
The Chinese ecosystem has the stronger open-weight frontier, led by Zhipu, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Alibaba, and MiniMax.
Kimi K3 · 157.6 ECILab depth
This is no longer a two-company race.
Each bar shows a lab’s highest deduplicated ECI score. Depth matters: both ecosystems now have five tracked labs above 145 ECI.
Western ecosystem
- OpenAI 166.3GPT-6 Astra
- Anthropic 164.5Claude Fable 5.1
- Google DeepMind 157.4Gemini 3.7 Flash 9 open-weight
- xAI 156.3Grok 4.6
- Meta AI 155.5Muse Spark 1.2 17 open-weight
- Mistral AI 141.3Mistral Medium 3.5 13 open-weight
- Microsoft 130.4Phi-4 6 open-weight
Chinese ecosystem
- Moonshot AI 157.6Kimi K3 6 open-weight
- Alibaba / Qwen 156.6Qwen 3.8 Max 24 open-weight
- DeepSeek 155.5DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 18 open-weight
- Zhipu AI / Z.ai 155.3GLM-5.3 6 open-weight
- MiniMax 146.5MiniMax-M2.5 3 open-weight
- 01.AI 117.3Yi-34B 2 open-weight
- Baichuan 102.9Baichuan2-13B 3 open-weight