Leading Chinese AI companies have shown remarkable capability in catching up with global frontiers. He cited ByteDance and other top firms as being “perhaps only six months behind the cutting edge,” with engineering optimization skills that have surprised Western peers, said Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

Hassabis clarified that he does not view China’s AI development as a catastrophic threat to the West. He praised DeepSeek’s models as impressive but suggested that market reactions to last year’s release of DeepSeek’s R1 model were “significantly overblown.”

“Chinese companies are indeed very good at following the technology frontier, and this ability is only getting stronger,” Hassabis said. “However, I don’t think they have yet demonstrated the capacity to drive breakthroughs in fundamental technology innovation.”