The United States’ long-held dominance in the global biotechnology sector is facing an unprecedented challenge from China, with artificial intelligence acting as a powerful accelerant in the race to develop new drugs. China’s growing strength in AI-driven research mirrors its advances in other deep-tech sectors including semiconductors and robotics. According to a new survey of senior US leaders in industry and academia, the gap between the two nations is closing rapidly, and a majority of respondents believe American leadership will not last another decade.
The poll, conducted by the Cure Innovation Index and presented at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s annual meeting in San Diego on June 22, 2026, surveyed 117 industry experts across pharma, biotech, and academia. A striking 85% of respondents stated that they believe the US lead in biotechnology will last 10 years or less, a finding that reflects a significant shift in sentiment from surveys conducted just a few years ago.
Where China Already Leads
The survey findings highlight specific areas where China has already surpassed the US. Respondents identified China as the clear leader in two critical sectors: clinical development and supply chain management. China now conducts more clinical drug trials than the US, benefiting from lower costs, streamlined regulations, a vast and diverse patient population, and government subsidies that critics argue create an uneven playing field.
In recent years, multinational pharmaceutical companies have increasingly turned to China to augment their drug pipelines. The pace of in-licensing deals has accelerated sharply, with Western pharmaceutical companies paying as little as $80 million upfront for Chinese-developed molecules they believe can be developed into multibillion-dollar treatments. By 2024, China’s share of global early drug development programs had risen to over 32%, up from just 8% in 2015, while the US share dropped from 48% to 37%, according to a Georgetown University study.
“China has speed, scale, manufacturing, development, execution, and the U.S. is better at scientific quality, talent, some work on the tech transfer, and most important of all, it has the access to the world’s most valuable healthcare market,” said Seema Kumar, CEO at Cure. “Commercialization is America’s superpower. The buyer is in the U.S.”
The Role of AI in Closing the Gap
Artificial intelligence is playing a pivotal role in reshaping this competitive landscape. AI-driven drug discovery platforms are enabling Chinese firms to identify promising compounds, optimize clinical trial designs, and analyze vast biological datasets faster than traditional methods allow. The result is a compression of the innovation timeline that is helping Chinese companies close the gap with their Western counterparts at a pace that would have seemed implausible a decade ago.
The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology warned in a December report that “China has systematically built a vertically integrated biotechnology ecosystem that is now in prime position to challenge U.S. leadership.” The combination of AI capabilities, manufacturing scale, and government support creates a formidable competitive platform.
US Funding Cuts as the Bigger Threat
Despite growing competition from China, the survey revealed an unexpected finding: respondents rated the threat of US research funding cuts as a greater concern than competition from China itself. This suggests that the primary risk to American biotech leadership may be self-inflicted rather than externally imposed.
“The U.S. has all of the right ingredients, but the way we have been funding probably needs to change,” Kumar noted, emphasizing the need to secure financing for institutions like the National Institutes of Health and to modernize the nation’s clinical development infrastructure. The Biosecure Act, signed into law by President Trump, restricts federal agencies’ business dealings with non-US biotechnology companies, but legislation alone cannot substitute for sustained research investment.
As AI continues to lower the barriers to entry in drug discovery, the competition between the US and China in biotechnology is poised to intensify, with profound implications for global healthcare, economic competitiveness, and national security.
The AI Drug Discovery Advantage
The specific ways in which AI is accelerating China’s biotech capabilities deserve closer examination. Chinese AI drug discovery companies such as XtalPi, Insilico Medicine, and BioMap have attracted significant investment and are deploying large-scale biological foundation models trained on vast datasets of protein structures, genomic sequences, and clinical trial outcomes.
These models can predict molecular behavior, identify drug candidates, and optimize dosing regimens at a speed and scale that human researchers cannot match. Critically, China’s relatively permissive regulatory environment for AI-assisted research, combined with its large patient population and extensive biobank resources, gives Chinese firms access to training data that their Western counterparts often struggle to obtain.
The combination of AI capability, data access, and manufacturing scale creates a compounding advantage that is difficult for US firms to replicate quickly, particularly at a time when federal research funding is under pressure and regulatory pathways for AI-assisted drug development remain uncertain.