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When DeepSeek unveiled an AI model last year that rivaled America’s best at a fraction of the cost, or when a Chinese hypersonic missile test caught U.S. intelligence off guard to the point where a top U.S. general called it “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”, the reaction each time was the same: that a handful of Chinese firms had suddenly pulled ahead.
But a sweeping new National Bureau of Economic Research study of nearly 14 million Chinese patents suggests that framing misses the real story—and it’s a more unsettling one for the United States.
Harvard Business School’s Josh Lerner and his co-authors dug into who is actually filing the patents behind the 14 technology areas the Pentagon deems critical—advanced computing, space technology, AI, hypersonics and biotech. The answer: Chinese universities account for more than a quarter of the country’s inventions in those fields, 8x the U.S. rate at 3.3%, with state-owned enterprises and the government accounting for just 4%. Fewer than one in 10 Chinese critical technology patents involve an inventor with U.S. work experience, undercutting the assumption that Beijing relies on returning U.S. talent for innovation.
Lerner told Fortune his team was “programmed” to expect a few large corporations like Huawei and Tencent to lead the charge on Chinese innovation through patents similarly to IBM and Samsung in the U.S. Instead, they found Chinese innovation in critical technologies “much more diverse—spread out across the parties,” with universities “more represented” there than anywhere else in the country’s patent system. That’s a reversal of the U.S. pattern, where academic patenting is “more of a sideshow.”
“We’ve clearly seen this dramatic boom in terms of research funding and patenting in China,” Lerner said, “and the natural question being is this bearing fruit? In the software side, Deepseek was certainly something that was really not anticipated, and clearly these open-source Chinese models are getting an enormous amount of traction.”
The findings arrive as the quality gap many assumed would protect American tech leadership seems to be closing, with DeepSeek, Moonshot and Z.AI going toe-to-toe with U.S. frontier labs and beating them on cost.
Using four text-based measures of patent novelty and scientific relevance, the authors found no evidence China’s patent boom came at the cost of quality—Chinese patents have converged with, and in some technologies overtaken, their U.S. counterparts. The share of Chinese critical-technology patents containing “disruptive” technical language jumped from under 2% in the early 1990s to 16% by 2022, closing in on the American share of roughly 20%.
There’s also a seeming difference in dynamics between China and the U.S. with their respective universities, especially as the Trump administration’s international student crackdown strained campuses and raised questions about the future of STEM talent.
The paper describes Beijing’s role as “coordinative rather than directly productive”—steering research through funding and priorities rather than owning the institutions that produce it. Lerner drew a contrast with his own university Harvard’s public standoff with Washington over research funding.
“When you think about the dynamics between our university and the administration, which has been a lot of back and forth in the courts,” he said, “one doesn’t suspect the same kind of interactions would characterize those between a major Chinese university and the state.”
The U.S. has scaled back its federal research grant pipeline. Last year, the Trump administration moved to cut $4 billion from NIH’s reimbursement of universities’ research overhead costs, capping a rate that had typically run 50-60% at just 15%. By April, the administration had formally terminated 1,392 NIH grants worth $539 million in unspent obligations, while the National Science Foundation had cancelled or suspended nearly 2,000 awards of its own: the Brennan Center for Justice puts total NIH and NSF cuts and freezes at more than $3 billion since 2025, with roughly $1.4 billion still frozen or unresolved. Some of the terminations have been reversed by courts, but the fights continue on a grant-by-grant basis.
The potential lag in innovation might not be seen immediately, but it could have a sizable effect on competition with China as the Trump administration has proposed steep cuts to federal science funding and a rewrite of federal grant rules that critics — including groups well outside academia, from farm cooperatives to bankers—warn would let agencies cancel research awards midstream.
“You don’t really see the consequences until perhaps years or even decades afterwards, just given the very long‑run nature of this process,” Lerner told Fortune.
While Lerner’s paper highlights the asymmetry in critical technology patent production between the U.S. and China, Dan Wang, a China analyst at Eurasia Group, is skeptical of how far the patent numbers should be trusted: commercialization rates for Chinese university patents remain low, Wang told Fortune over email, and few are filed overseas, while companies like Nvidia and Google drive “exceptionally strong” R&D in the United States.
The rankings are catching up to the money. In June, Harvard lost the top spot in the Nature Index Research Leaders—a closely watched measure of high-quality research output—for the first time since the index began tracking universities in 2015. Among academic institutions, Zhejiang University (the alma mater of DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng), moved into first place, with Harvard falling to second. Including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government research body rather than a university, Harvard falls to third place. Nine of the top 10 academic institutions globally are now Chinese; five years ago, eight of the top 10 were American.
“China is likely to narrow the gap in patent-related indicators, but not in overall technological leadership,” Wang said. “The university innovation system is heavily influenced by administrative process and political mandate, and thus does not leave enough room for self driven research.”
But Wang cautioned that Washington’s fixation on sanctioning a handful of “national champions” in China like Huawei and Tencent overlooks “the real base for China’s technological upgrading”—decentralized networks of universities, suppliers and state-owned enterprises. Wang estimates there are 18,000 state-designated “little giant” firms working on components and materials alone.
“Sanctioning a few major firms alone is unlikely to halt the broader ecosystem,” Wang added.
China surpassed the U.S. in total R&D spending for the first time in 2024, investing $1.03 trillion to America’s $1.01 trillion, and has reached via R&D growth topping 14% annually since 2004, more than double the U.S. pace.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
