By Jennifer Wong Leung, Stephan Robin, and Danielle Cave of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Cyber, Technology and Security programme.
What it measures
The Tracker assesses national research leadership across critical technologies by high-impact research output, extended in this edition across two decades — which is what allows it to distinguish durable positions from recent movement. Its subtitle states the finding it is organized to support: "the rewards of long-term research investment."
The Tracker is the source most commonly cited in comparative national-capability arguments about AI and adjacent technologies, and this two-decade edition is the version those citations generally refer to.
Reading it
Two limits are worth carrying alongside the figures. The measure is research publication and citation impact, which tracks the upstream end of capability rather than deployed systems, commercial output, or compute access. And leadership in a technology category is not the same as leadership in the specific subfields that matter for frontier AI — the categories are broad by design, since the Tracker's purpose is breadth of coverage across critical technologies rather than depth in any one.
Relationships
- supports: US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics — supplies the research-output dimension of the comparison, alongside compute, capability, and deployment
- related: ASPI — Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Export Controls (AI), Chinese AI Policy