And yet, the world’s AI superpowers still collaborate to a surprising degree when it comes to cutting-edge research. The transformer architecture, developed by a team of researchers at Google and now widely used across the industry, is featured in 292 papers with authors from Chinese institutions. “Whether policymakers on both sides like it or not, the US and Chinese AI ecosystems are inextricably enmeshed—and both benefit from the arrangement,” Ding says. This involved having Codex write a script to search for US and Chinese institutions in the author field of each paper. The process involved a fair bit of trial and error, and you have to be very careful, because AI models make surprisingly stupid mistakes even when they’re being quite smart.