As the United States and China vie for dominance in artificial intelligence (AI), the Trump administration has made it more difficult for companies to hire foreign researchers, while China has made recruiting the world’s best scientists a national priority.
Over the past two years, China has flung open its doors to international researchers, introducing a visa for scientists and offering lucrative research grants.
Despite those efforts, foreigners are not coming.
Worse still for China’s ambitions, the number of Chinese scientists working in the United States has risen rather than declined, according to a new study about global AI research.
For every 30 Chinese researchers in the United States working on AI in 2025, only one in China made the opposite journey, according to the study, conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank.
“Despite US-China tensions, the number of Chinese-origin researchers working in the US actually rose by 4 percentage points rather than declined” compared with three years ago, said Damien Ma, who led the study.
The study determined the flow of scientists around the world by examining research papers accepted by last year’s NeurIPS, an academic conference focused on machine learning and computational neuroscience. Ma and his team analysed where the papers’ authors went to college, received graduate degrees and ended up working.
The results affirm the popular understanding that the United States and China are the two places where most frontier AI research is being produced. While China is failing to recruit foreign researchers, the study found, it is seeing a boon in retaining local talent, people who have risen through the domestic education system and are increasingly choosing not to seek work overseas. The United States, on the other hand, maintains its lead by employing foreign researchers, many of whom previously emigrated from China, as well as India, South Korea and elsewhere.
The Carnegie study counts those researchers who migrated from one country to another, but it does not indicate when a researcher moved. One explanation for why the number of Chinese scientists working in America remains high is that they arrived before the Trump administration imposed restrictions on obtaining visas and cut research funding last year.
“There is a delay effect – the researchers in this study mostly made their decisions years ago to study or work here,” said Yingyi Ma, a sociology professor at Syracuse University who studies Asian students in the United States. “The danger for the US is a slow erosion of its appeal to attract talent that compounds over decades. By the time the effect shows up in the data, it is hard to reverse.”
For years, Chinese scientists and their peers from around the world were drawn to the United States, which offered career opportunities at startups and ample academic funding. But China has gained significant ground in recent years as an alternative for AI researchers.
In 2022, only six of the top 30 institutions publishing papers at NeurIPS were based in China; in 2025, that number rose to 12. Peking University and Tsinghua University, two of China’s top academic institutions, sat at the top of the chart, eclipsing American heavyweights like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon. Chinese researchers also made up 41% of the published authors at NeurIPS last year, eclipsing US researchers, who stood at 34%.
Today, China has an abundance of workplaces for AI researchers, including well-funded universities, big tech companies and startups, said Kevin Xu, the founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in AI technologies. As Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot repeatedly make names for themselves on the global stage, they also become more attractive to top talent.
“The fact that being able to work at DeepSeek gives you just as much professional prestige and future success as working at OpenAI is quite different from what we’ve observed five years ago, when the path was between working at Google versus Tencent,” Xu said.
The ascendancy of Chinese companies might explain why a vast majority of Chinese AI researchers choose to remain in the country. But, Xu added, there’s another reason some researchers remain in China: The government is unwilling to let them go.
This year, the Chinese government restricted the two founders of Manus, an AI startup that was set to be acquired by Meta for US$2bil (RM8.17bil), from leaving the country. Since then, travel by Chinese AI entrepreneurs and researchers – as well as by their spouses and children – has been further curtailed, according to a recent Bloomberg report.
While China is struggling to recruit foreign talent, it has made some gains in its effort to encourage Chinese researchers and executives abroad to return.
Chinese tech giant Tencent last year appointed Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher, as its chief AI scientist. The move was seen as one of the most notable examples of an AI researcher returning to China after having studied and worked in the West.
Despite China’s new offers of visas and grant money, Silicon Valley still provides more attractive offers and investment opportunities than China for American researchers. Also, moving to a country with few immigrants and a different language is always going to be a challenge.
“For everybody else who’s outside the walled garden, culturally or digitally, it’s still very hard to break into,” Xu said. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
