Headaches for Silicon Valley as China chips away at the US’s lead in the AI race

Google’s AI struggles scream trouble as new Chinese models (again) throw US tech dominance into question Hello, I’m Blake Montgomery, writing to you after a double-header feature of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and the World Cup final. What a great Sunday. Today in tech, we’re discussing how China is chipping away at the US’s lead in the AI race and how Silicon Valley’s workers are taking action to protect their jobs from AI. Google is struggling with the latest version of its Gemini model A Chinese company, Moonshot, put out a free, surprisingly capable model last week China’s new models yet again thrown the US dominance in AI into question Google is months behind in its launch schedule for the new version of its flagship AI model, Gemini 3.5. According to Bloomberg, Google is attempting to improve Gemini’s coding abilities to catch up to Claude, the Anthropic bot that is widely considered the best AI coding tool. OpenAI released a new model at the start of July; Google had been expected to do the same in May. News of the delay sent Google’s shares sliding as investors questioned whether it could maintain its top position in the AI race. A refreshed and newly