On August 12, 2026, the Chinese-language website of the French international broadcaster RFI (Radio France Internationale) reported on an article from the French newspaper Le Figaro, stating that China's AI industry is emerging across the board and is establishing its own ecosystem to replace that of the United States.

The article first touched upon China's overwhelming dominance in the robotics sector, which constitutes the physical layer, introducing that 97% of humanoid robots shipped worldwide from January to June this year were made in China. It reported that emerging companies like Unitree Robotics (宇樹科技) and UBTECH (優必選) are dominating the market, with such momentum that the U.S. Trump administration will be forced to introduce measures to ban the import of Chinese-made robots at the end of July.

Next, it pointed out that in the development of AI models, which constitute the software layer, Chinese companies are closing in on the U.S., armed with low costs and high performance. It reported that due to the rapid advancements of "Kimi 3" developed by Chinese startup "Moonshot AI" (月之暗面) and the video generation model "H3," among others, the technology gap between top U.S. and Chinese models has narrowed to 8 months.

Furthermore, regarding the frequent use of "model distillation" technology, which extracts knowledge from existing high-performance models, although the U.S. side is claiming intellectual property infringement, the article presented the view that such methods are common in the industry, and therefore the U.S. criticism lacks persuasiveness.

The article further introduced that China is developing its own "open-source" strategy, and by Chinese companies providing freely customizable models, they are eroding the revenue base of U.S. companies that deploy expensive commercial models. Leveraging its huge domestic market of 602 million generative AI users by the end of 2025, it reported that China is promoting an "open system" to expand its soft power into Global South countries.

In addition, after mentioning the reality that China is independently developing semiconductors while circumventing U.S. sanctions, it analyzed that this rapid growth is supported by enormous capital inflows from the capital market. It pointed out that major AI startup companies are successively planning IPOs and moving to raise vast amounts of capital.

Finally, the article concluded that China's pursuit of the U.S. in the AI sector is already a definitive trend, and the focus is no longer "whether it will catch up" but "how quickly it will catch up." (Edited and translated by Kawajiri)