‘Not What We Want to Hear’: Fox Host Alarmed by News China Is ‘Neck and Neck’ With US in Key Tech Race

Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt expressed alarm on Monday after being informed that China was quickly catching up to the United States in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.

After boasting on Fox & Friends that the U.S. had “led the field with 50 major AI models compared to 30 from China” in 2025, Earhardt asked Russell Wald, the executive director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, for his other findings in the institute’s latest report.

“It’s packed with a lot of interesting things that we see every year,” said Wald. “But one of the most standout ones is that China has actually closed the model performance gap, and that means that the quality of the models coming from China are becoming at a neck and neck pace with the United States.”

“Okay, that’s not good. That’s not what we want to hear,” replied Earhardt. “I think we have a graph of how they are inching up towards our level. Why has that gap narrowed? What are they doing that we’re not doing?”

Wald explained, “I think one of the most important things is they have embraced an open source community. That’s essentially what they are doing, is they release the recipe of this and that allows for other members of their ecosystem to build and allow for this vibrant ecosystem in China and they’re building on all of these models.”

Asked whether the U.S. was able to do the same, Wald responded, “We can. We actually have had a bit of a pivot towards that, but one of the challenges related to that I think is public opinion. Our report measures public opinion every year and the public opinion in China, the favorability towards the models is 84% for China, and in the United States it’s 38%.”

Watch above via Fox News.

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