Where do the top AI models come from?
The national origin of the AI models AI IQ tracks, over time
A two-country race
American companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta — still produce most of the frontier models tracked here.
Chinese labs — Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, Z.ai, Xiaomi — were barely present at the start of 2025 and have climbed sharply through 2026.
Everyone else is a sliver: France (Mistral), Canada (Cohere), and South Korea (LG) are the only non-US, non-China origins to appear at all.
A model's country is the home country of the company that trained its base weights, not where it is hosted or served.
Note: Country is assigned from the company that trained each model's base weights, not where it is hosted or served. Bars are cumulative — a model is counted from its release month onward. Beyond the United States and China, only France (Mistral), Canada (Cohere), and South Korea (LG) appear, each as a small recent addition. A few model variants without a recorded release date are omitted, but their labs are represented by other models.
Reading the share
Normalizing each month to 100% strips out the raw growth in model count and shows only the balance of origins.
The United States started near total dominance and has steadily ceded ground as China — and, more recently, a few European and Korean labs — entered the frontier.