The US is losing its lead in AI
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What is the current state of the US vs China AI race and why does it matter?
Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of The Model Wars. I'm your friend David Pearce, and today on the show, we're talking about the AI race ongoing between the US and China. For really the last several years, it's been pretty apparent that most of the best models and most of the most ambitious, most impressive AI has been coming out of Silicon Valley. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, this handful of companies has been really driving the AI revolution. But then it has increasingly become clear that China is catching up quickly. We had a big moment a year and a half ago where DeepSeek all of a sudden showed up with a vastly more efficient, vastly cheaper model that was almost as good as some of the frontier stuff.
And that became a big deal. Then just this past weekend, two different companies, Moonshot and Alibaba, made very clear that they have built frontier models that they believe to be just as important as anything else coming out of Silicon Valley. There is a race happening between the US and China to win at AI, whatever that means. It's becoming a huge tech story. It's becoming a huge policy story. And I want to figure out what's going to happen if and when China catches up and even passes what's happening in the labs in Silicon Valley. So that's what we're going to talk about. Lauren Feiner and Hayden Field are going to come. We're going to do it. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.
This is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Monday, July 20th, 2026. The Odyssey is a huge hit. It made $264.1 million worldwide this weekend, which is both Christopher Nolan's biggest opening ever and one of the biggest movies of the year so far. I haven't seen it yet. I'm hoping to wait for a 70mm IMAX screening, but those are apparently sold out, like, forever. In general, this has been a big summer for the movies. You have obvious wins like Toy Story 5 to surprise breakouts like Obsession. Both great movies, by the way. It's shaping up to be the best year for movies since before the pandemic, all the way back to 2019. And if going to the movies isn't dead after all, that might be really great news for Hollywood.
And maybe bad news for the streaming services that were pretty sure they'd already won this war. Meanwhile, the European Commission just levied its biggest fine ever against the platform AliExpress for failing to prevent illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products being sold on the platform. Honestly, if you've ever been on AliExpress, none of that should surprise you. The Commission specifically mentioned things like unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics and said that AliExpress has until October to come up with a plan to fix it. Timu got a similar fine for similar reasons this year. I don't know if the end of these ultra-cheap, relatively unmoderated shopping platforms is coming immediately, but there is a big fight coming, and fast.
And finally, a leather jacket once worn by Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang was bought on auction for $960,000. I'm not saying this is the moment to call the top on AI and tech and the economy and everything, but boy is it getting weird out there, my friends. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Monday, July 20th.
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Joining me now, two people deeply qualified to make this make any sense to me. The Verge's Hayden Field, our senior AI reporter. Hi, Hayden. Hey, great to be here. And Lauren Feiner, our senior policy reporter. Hello.
Hi.
All of us are just like deep in China is the bad guy in bizarre and confusing and unknowable ways. So we're going to try to make sense of this along one very particular axis today, and that is AI.
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