‘China is moving incredibly fast,’ Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis warns GenAI racers

Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, has shared a new assessment of the global AI race, stating that China is now “only months behind” the United States and the West in the development of frontier artificial intelligence systems, including the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos on January 15, 2026, Hassabis highlighted China’s extraordinary speed of progress, massive state-backed investment, and growing talent pool as some of the key factors that have dramatically narrowed the gap over the last 12–18 months.