When DeepSeek unveiled an AI model last year that rivaled America’s best at a fraction of the cost, or when a Chinese hypersonic missile test caught U.S. intelligence off guard to the point where a top U.S. general called it “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”, the reaction each time was the same: that a handful of Chinese firms had suddenly pulled ahead.
But a sweeping new National Bureau of Economic Research study of nearly 14 million Chinese patents suggests that framing misses the real story—and it’s a more unsettling one for the United States.
