Where do the top AI models come from?

The national origin of the AI models AI IQ tracks, over time

AI Models by Country Over Time

Each bar counts the AI models AI IQ tracks that had been released by that month, stacked by the country of their developer.

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.

Other represented origins include France (Mistral), Canada (Cohere), South Korea (LG), and Japan (Sakana AI).

A model's country is the home country of its developer. For multi-model systems such as Sakana Fugu, this identifies the orchestrator developer, not the origin of every underlying model.

Note: Country is assigned from the company that trained the model or developed its orchestrator, not where it is hosted or served. Bars are cumulative — a model is counted from its release month onward. Other represented countries include France, Canada, South Korea, and Japan (Sakana AI). A few model variants without a recorded release date are omitted, but their labs are represented by other models.

AI Model Share by Country Over Time

The national origin of tracked AI models as a share of the total — each month normalized to 100%, so the changing balance between countries is easy to read.

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.