SINGAPORE—A Chinese artificial-intelligence company has Silicon Valley marveling at how its programmers nearly matched American rivals despite using inferior chips. AI models from DeepSeek, the Chinese company,

DeepSeek’s latest models, created by a small company with limited resources, are already beating many of the leading AI models in the United States.

Two years on, a new AI model from China has flipped that question: can the US stop Chinese innovation? For a while, Beijing seemed to fumble with its answer to ChatGPT, which is not available in China.