China’s AI Race Strategy Centers on State-Led Deployment as U.S. Chases Frontier Models

China is using state direction, mass adoption and low-cost open-weight models as its central AI race strategy, while the United States remains more concentrated on frontier capability and superintelligence. The split, laid out in a new Axios analysis, turns the contest into a fight over deployment, compute, chips, electricity, robotics and public trust - not only benchmark scores.