The closing window of opportunity for US global technology leadership

For many years, U.S. policymakers have focused on how to stay technologically ahead of China. That framing is outdated. Moving forward, the focus will need to be on how to avoid falling behind. To do that, the U.S. will need to attract and retain the world’s top technology talent—something that we can no longer take for granted today.

A summit of peer nations

The dynamics of the May 2026 summit between U.S President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping reflected China’s status as a peer nation to the United States. Trump implicitly acknowledged as much in a Fox News interview after meeting Xi when he said,  “It’s the two great countries. I call it the G-2.”

A New York Times article describing the meeting between the two presidents on the first day of the summit observed “the new equilibrium between the two adversaries … leaving no doubt that for all of China’s problems—deflation, depopulation, the bursting of the real estate bubble—the moment when China acts as a peer superpower had arrived.” While China’s rise is due to many factors, its technology sector is chief among them.

China’s technological ascendancy

Signs of China’s technological ascendancy are plentiful. Chinese-made electric vehicles are becoming dominant globally, except in the U.S. where protectionist tariffs largely keep them out. China leads the world in industrial robotics, with a rapidly growing installed base of over two million factory robots, and is outcompeting the U.S. in battery technology. China’s research and development spending is now at parity with America’s.

China also leads in clean energy installations, controlling “11 of the top 15 largest solar farms globally,” including Talatan Solar Park, which spans an area “seven times the size of Manhattan.” A recent New York Times article noted that in 2025, “China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined,” and that “all of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese.”

America’s technology advantages

The U.S. still retains a set of critically important technological advances. In artificial intelligence (AI) chip design, the U.S. remains the clear global leader. The U.S. is home to a unique constellation of extraordinarily successful and impactful tech behemoths. Of the 10 publicly traded companies globally with the largest market capitalization, eight of them are American, and all of those are technology-focused.

The collective power of the technological research at U.S. tech companies and universities is unmatched anywhere else in the world (though recent cuts in federal research funding to universities threaten that advantage). The U.S. also has the world’s best startup ecosystem, including a thriving venture capital sector and a longstanding culture of welcoming and rewarding technology entrepreneurship.

The problems with static comparisons

In AI, comparisons between the U.S. and China often focus on evaluations of how many months ahead the U.S. is. But in addition to being highly subjective, those sorts of assessments are inevitably based on assumptions that can be upended overnight, as occurred in early 2025 when China’s DeepSeek released a generative AI-powered chatbot that tech investor Marc Andreesen called “AI’s Sputnik moment.”

Framing how AI technology is leading in terms of months makes it harder to see the big picture. AI development has been ongoing for decades and will continue for decades more. When two countries are so close in capabilities that the differences are measured in mere months, they are for all practical purposes in a dead heat.

Technological progress: Speed matters

A more fundamental shortcoming of point-in-time comparisons is that they deflect attention from an equally important metric, which is the rate of progress. In 2017, the last time Trump traveled to China for a summit with Xi, no one was measuring the U.S. lead over China in AI or any other technology in months.

The fact that such conversations are happening today reflects China’s extraordinary technological progress over the past decade. If the technology ecosystems in the U.S. and China continue to develop at their respective current rates for the next decade, in 2036 it will be the U.S. that is eager to show the world that it is the technological peer of China, not the other way around.

Attracting global technology talent

The single most important way to ensure continued U.S. technology leadership is to resuscitate a model that is currently under threat: the strong inflow of technology talent from overseas that has been such a key ingredient in the extraordinary success of the American technology sector. Approximately two out of every three tech workers in Silicon Valley were born overseas. About half of tech startup founding teams in Silicon Valley include at least one immigrant co-founder.

These statistics are lagging indicators, reflecting the historical dynamics of immigration patterns and access to American higher education. Many of the immigrant engineers who work in the U.S. tech sector first arrived in the U.S. as college or graduate students. Constricting that pipeline today will create effects that play out over years and decades.

Hurdles for talented early-career engineers

The hurdles and disincentives for talented young people to come from overseas to study engineering at U.S. universities are higher now than at any other time in recent memory. I have a front row seat to these changes as an engineering faculty member at a major U.S. research university: I now receive far fewer inquiries from overseas college students about potential engineering graduate school opportunities than in the past. Colleagues at my university and elsewhere report similar experiences. These are only anecdotes, but they suggest a troubling picture under which top engineering students from around the world are far less likely than in the past to believe they can build technology careers in the United States.

Compounding this change is a growing trend for U.S.-trained, U.S.-employed engineers from China who are choosing to not to continue their careers here. A recent Wall Street Journal article documented how an increasing number of highly trained China-born engineers are choosing to leave U.S. companies for lucrative opportunities in China.

If not reversed, these trends will have an enormous negative impact as they undermine one of the key asymmetries that has helped build and maintain the U.S. as a technology superpower: Like no other country, the U.S. has been a destination of choice for young engineers and tech entrepreneurs from around the world.

With a diminished inflow of global talent—and with lower incentives for those people who do come to remain here—U.S. technology innovation will slow dramatically. This will impact America’s technology position globally, and most starkly in relation to China.

Why parity with China matters, especially in AI

Today, the U.S. and China are in approximate equilibrium in terms of AI and related technologies. The U.S. leads in some areas (e.g., AI chip design, generative AI) while China leads in others (industrial robotics, clean energy). Both countries are able to benefit from the economic opportunities that flow from their respective AI strengths.

However, a future in which China pulls far ahead of the U.S. in most areas of AI would have enormous negative consequences for the U.S., both economically and in terms of defense. Boosted by the efficiencies and profits enabled by its commanding lead in AI, China would be able to solidify dominance in global markets in electric vehicles, telecommunications, manufacturing technology, data centers, and many other sectors.

That market growth would come largely at the expense of U.S. companies, with corresponding costs to the U.S. economy. If China achieves clear technology superiority in defense, the U.S. defense industry would suffer, as would American ability to project power and defend allies in locations (particularly the western Pacific) where China also has growing ambitions.

To fully benefit from the extraordinary opportunities that AI and other technologies will bring in the coming decades, the U.S. doesn’t need to be the uncontested global leader. But the U.S. certainly should not be a clear laggard, and the window of opportunity to avoid that outcome is closing quickly.

The U.S. needs to reinvigorate the pipeline that until recently welcomed the world’s most talented young engineers to pursue their educations and careers here so that the U.S. can benefit from the innovations they develop, the companies they start, and the jobs they create.