Huawei plans major gains in AI chip performance by 2030, but US export controls cap its most important scaling levers. Epoch AI estimates Huawei will produce less than 4% as much AI compute as Nvidia in 2026, a share that could be around 1% by 2028 without access to foreign memory.

AI model scores on Epoch AI's IKEA furniture assembly benchmark jumped from 28% to 80% in 10 months, with open-weight models trailing closed-weight models by about 7 months. Epoch AI's test of visual and spatial reasoning across 60 photos from three furniture builds.

Epoch AI measures how fast the cost of a given level of AI performance is falling across five benchmarks covering math, science and games of skill: about 47% per quarter, or 13x per year, since 2023, faster than electricity, compute, batteries or DNA sequencing ever fell.

Acknowledgments of AI use in arXiv math preprints rose from 4% in April 2026 to 25% in August, with 6% crediting AI with a substantial research contribution.

Epoch AI's analysis of trade data finds a pattern consistent with $3B worth of chips smuggled to China via Malaysia. China recorded $3.8B of server imports from Malaysia in 2024–25; Malaysia recorded only $0.6B of exports.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra tops the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI) with a score of 166, ahead of Claude Fable 5.1 at 164 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 162. Its Math-ECI of 170 sets a new record, but on software engineering benchmarks its SWE-ECI of 164 still lags behind Fable 5.1's 167.

Epoch AI's AI Data Centers explorer now covers an estimated 44% of global AI compute across 86 sites, with a redesigned interface and expanding global coverage.

The share of US adults using AI at least 6 days a week rose from 8% in March 2026 to 19% in August 2026, according to Epoch AI/Ipsos polling.

A first look at Epoch AI's data on compute usage across five leading labs.

Epoch AI measures long-context latency scaling across four frontier models. GPT-5.6 Terra and Sol show quadratic time-to-first-token growth with context length, while Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 stay near-linear.