Many people believe Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models are leading the global tech race according to a new poll by the London-based consultancy Public First. However, the poll also revealed that China lags in trust regarding its AI models. The survey, which covered over 18,000 people across 15 countries, found that respondents from 11 nations acknowledged China’s AI leadership. These included Canada, Britain and France, where at least 40% of those polled deemed China to be outpacing the U.S. in AI capability and innovation. Germany was the least convinced of U.S. leadership in AI, with only 23% of respondents saying the U.S. was ahead. Public First did not conduct its poll in China. Among Americans surveyed, 24% said that China was ahead of the U.S., while 51% stated the opposite.
Nevertheless, the poll showed that AI models from the U.S. were considered more trustworthy than those developed in China. Measuring the “net trust” element by subtracting the percentage of distrust from that of trust, the U.S. ranked in second place (+16), following Japan (+22), while China placed 10th with a negative value (-8). AI was seen as the most impactful technology in today’s world, with 46% of respondents holding the opinion that it had already transformed the world, while 45% believed that it would do so in the future. However, most respondents expressed fears due to the drastic changes AI is bringing about. The results showed that “we saw clear support from a majority in nearly every country for a pause on AI development”, the company said.
Meanwhile, China continues to push the country’s “AI Plus” strategy, which seeks to integrate the cutting-edge technology across manufacturing, agriculture and services. Domestic companies are also rolling out new models that compete with their U.S. rivals on global benchmarks. Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen3.7-Max placed eighth and Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.1 was ninth on the Code Arena ranking for front-end web development tasks, the only non-Anthropic models among the top 10. Code Arena is a subset of Arena, created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, to evaluate AI performance.
Beijing-based Zhipu GLM-5.2 was launched last week, offering a more affordable alternative to Western models. It is priced at roughly a 10th of Anthropic’s premium Claude Code and Claude Max, the South China Morning Post reports.
