The emerging U.S. and Chinese commercial artificial intelligence (AI) developer sectors remain poorly specified. The aim of the study described in this report was to systematically characterize the commercial AI ecosystems within the United States and China and thus broaden the empirical foundation for business intelligence and policy analysis. This report fills an important gap in the literature on explaining the modern AI development ecosystem.

AI Development in the United States and China

Evidence from a New Dataset of AI Developer Firms

Jon Schmid, Prateek Puri, Vitor Melo, Anthony Hakim

ResearchPublished Aug 17, 2026

The emerging U.S. and Chinese commercial artificial intelligence (AI) developer sectors remain poorly specified. The aim of the study described in this report was to systematically characterize the commercial AI ecosystems within the United States and China and thus broaden the empirical foundation for business intelligence and policy analysis. To this end, the authors constructed a novel dataset of AI developers headquartered in the United States and China that met a set of innovation criteria. They then analyzed this dataset, focusing on three categories of information: basic descriptive information about the population of U.S. and Chinese AI developers, the commercial orientation of firms in each country, and the technical approaches taken by firms in each country. This report fills an important gap in the literature on explaining the modern AI development ecosystem, a field that has largely relied on anecdotal evidence or official policy statements rather than systematic cross-national comparison of the firms shaping advanced AI.

Key Takeaways

The two AI developer firm populations studied in the sample are structurally more similar than commonly assumed

  • On most dimensions—e.g., model architecture, commercial positioning, foundation-model development, and learning paradigm—U.S. and Chinese AI developer firm ecosystems closely resemble each other.
  • Both are transformer-led, both have roughly 20 percent foundation-model developers, and the majority of firms in both countries build applied AI products rather than operating model-as-a-service or inference-as-a-service delivery models.

The largest divergence is physical embodiment versus software

  • Sixty-one percent of U.S. firms are software-only, compared with just 26 percent of Chinese firms.
  • Chinese firms are heavily concentrated in embodied form factors (such as humanoid robots, ground robots, and autonomous vehicles) and in industry verticals (such as manufacturing, transportation, and energy). U.S. firms concentrate in knowledge-intensive, software-delivered verticals such as health care, scientific research, and cybersecurity.
  • The two ecosystems are, by these measures, building AI for different environments and domains of application.
  • This finding speaks to the ongoing debate over whether the United States is insufficiently diversified in its approach to AI. Within the AI developer firm ecosystem, the strongest version of the concern—that the United States pursues a single architectural approach while China pursues many—is not supported by the data.
  • However, should the path to artificial general intelligence ultimately require codevelopment with robotics, world models, and physical-environment learning, the comparatively broad embodied AI portfolio observed among Chinese firms represents a meaningful hedge that the U.S. ecosystem lacks.

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Schmid, Jon, Prateek Puri, Vitor Melo, and Anthony Hakim, AI Development in the United States and China: Evidence from a New Dataset of AI Developer Firms. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA5043-1.html.
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