As the United States and China vie for A.I. dominance, 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 A.I. research.
For every 30 Chinese researchers in the United States working on artificial intelligence 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 U.S.-China tensions, the number of Chinese-origin researchers working in the U.S. actually rose by four 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. Mr. Ma and his team analyzed where the papers’ authors went to college, received graduate degrees and ended up working.
