The AI dilemma: To compete with China, the U.S. needs Chinese talent

As Washington tries to curb Chinese influence in artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley can’t get enough of Chinese researchers. The tension highlights a paradox at the heart of America’s AI strategy: Lawmakers are pushing to limit Chinese talent on national security grounds, while for tech companies, many of the brightest minds come from China. How the U.S. reconciles these competing pressures could shape who leads the global race in AI.

China accounted for nearly half the world’s top AI talent, according to a 2023 report from research firm MacroPolo. It’s unlikely that the number has changed significantly since. What has changed is U.S. policy. In May this year, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” And that it will “enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” from mainland China and Hong Kong.

This rhetoric has already had an impact: China used to top the list of countries that send students to the U.S. It has now slipped to second place after India. Yet Chinese talent is still highly prized in Silicon Valley. Seven out of 11 of the highest-profile hires at Meta’s new superintelligence lab — some of whom were lured with offers of up to $100 million — got their undergraduate degrees in China.

Google hired Kaiming He at DeepMind. He teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is best known as the co-author of a paper on image recognition, which is the most-cited paper in the 21st century. He has a Ph.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a bachelor’s degree from Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Nvidia also recently made two high-profile hires from China — Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao. The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, told the Hill & Valley Forum earlier this year that “50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese,” which should “play into how we think about the game.” 

Instead of shutting China out completely, it is better to have the brightest Chinese talent work for U.S. firms than to have them bat for the other side.”

The competition for AI talent has parallels with that for high-end chips. The U.S. initially opposed any chip sales to China, but the emerging consensus seems to be that it’s better to bring China into American AI infrastructure at the lower end than to have it build out its own alternative. In talent, too, the strategy seems to be: Instead of shutting China out completely, it is better to have the brightest Chinese talent work for U.S. firms than to have them bat for the other side.

What is happening now is not that different from what has come before, according to Jeremy Neufeld, director of immigration policy at Institute for Progress, a think tank in Washington, D.C. The U.S. has a long history of hosting scientists from countries seen as rivals. Emigres from Germany and the former Soviet Union played an outsize role in giving the U.S. an edge in building critical technologies, which, for instance, helped it win the space race, Neufeld told Rest of World.

Should we be concerned about U.S. competitiveness in STEM in general, and in AI specifically, given the extent to which the tech industry relies on talent from one foreign country? It is in fact an indicator of the opposite, Neufeld said. “We have this huge advantage, which is that we can draw on the best researchers from around the world,” including from adversaries, which is what has always upheld America’s competitiveness, he said.

“I see the share of AI talent in the United States that is born abroad as an asset to the United States, and a sign for me to be bullish about our competitiveness because that’s an advantage that we can rely on, and that we’ve historically relied on,” Neufeld said.

But others advise caution. Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer at Meta, is, at 28, the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. He is the child of first-generation Chinese immigrant scientists who worked on advanced weapons technologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Wang has commented frequently on the competitive and security threats posed by China, and how Chinese citizens based in the U.S. often serve as conduits for fulfilling China’s technological ambitions. Half the people reporting to Wang completed at least one degree in Chinese universities.

“Stanford University is entirely infiltrated by CCP [Chinese Communist Party] operatives,” he said in a podcast earlier this year. “If you’re a Chinese citizen and you’re living in the United States, and the intelligence agencies in China reach out to you, you have to comply with them. … There’s tons of Chinese nationals, Chinese citizens across all the major universities, across all the major tech companies, across all the major AI labs — they’re everywhere,” he told host Shawn Ryan.

Some Chinese researchers have been uncharacteristically blunt in their criticism of Wang’s take. “We don’t need political narratives and clowns like Alexandr Wang,” Zhiding Yu, principal research scientist and research lead at Nvidia, said in a recent post on X.

These frictions raise the prospect that more Chinese talent could leave U.S. firms to work for competitors back home, or to foster homegrown talent.”

Policy experts have also expressed concern that the hard line taken by Wang and others could accelerate the flight of Chinese talent from the U.S., strengthening the position of the country’s main geopolitical rival. More of China’s AI talent is choosing to stay at home, an assessment from the Brookings Institution last year said. It cited data showing that while only 11% of the world’s top AI talent was based in China in 2019, this figure had climbed to 28% by 2022.

“Advancements in China’s AI higher education are enticing many top Chinese talent to stay in China,” noted Yingyi Ma, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. While “a small number of Chinese students have participated in espionage,” treating the entire group with suspicion has morphed into anti-Asian racism, which poses challenges in securing research funding, Ma said. Asian researchers also face “the highest rejection rates” for National Science Foundation grant applications and are increasingly leaving the U.S. or returning to China as a result, she said.

Many Asians see the hostile actions as an echo of the China Initiative, a program by the Department of Justice to counter Chinese espionage in U.S. research communities, launched during President Donald Trump’s first term. Over 2,000 cases were opened against Chinese scientists, including one that led to the high-profile arrest of Gang Chen, a professor at MIT, who was accused of concealing his affiliations with the Chinese government. The charges were later dismissed.

These frictions raise the prospect that more Chinese talent could leave U.S. firms to work for competitors back home, or to foster homegrown talent. Zhang Ya-Qin, who spent 16 years at Microsoft, including a stint as the company’s highest-ranking official in China, is now dean of the Institute for AI Industry Research at Tsinghua University, the most vaunted academic AI research lab in the country.

“The caliber of students is just as impressive as MIT, Caltech, and Columbia — it’s amazing,” Zhang told Rest of World. His enthusiasm is borne out by the fact that China is the most represented country in elite AI and computer vision conferences. In 2024, up to half of all accepted papers at the five most prestigious AI conferences — CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, and AAAI — had at least one author affiliated with a Chinese institution.

All of which brings us back to the question: Can the U.S. continue to define China as the enemy but also rely on Chinese talent to win the AI race? As the U.S. moves to restrict overseas talent, China this month rolled out the K visa, which allows foreign science and technology talent to enter without an invitation or sponsorship from a Chinese employer or institution.

A curious inversion is taking place: The U.S., once a champion of open markets and free trade, has turned increasingly protectionist, while China has positioned itself as an unlikely advocate of globalism. This reversal is no longer confined to trade — it now spills over to how the two countries approach talent.