A December 3 report from the Carnegie Endowment finds that China overtook the United States as the top destination for elite AI researchers between 2022 and 2025: China’s share climbed from 27.1% to 40.6% while the U.S. share dropped from 46.4% to 34.2%. The piece highlights this shift as a measurable reorientation of senior AI talent rather than a marginal fluctuation.
The authors traced a cohort of 100 Chinese-origin researchers who worked at U.S. institutions in 2019 and found that by 2025, 87 remained in the U.S. (41 at private companies, 40 at universities, six in doctoral/postdoc roles), 10 returned to Chinese companies or universities, and three relocated elsewhere. The 10 who left include two startup founders, two tech executives and five professors, notably Yang Zhilin, a CMU PhD who founded Moonshot AI in China in 2023 and has since raised over $1 billion with open-source models adopted by U.S. startups. The study updates the Paulson Institute Global AI Talent Tracker and notes Chinese-origin authors composed 29% of accepted NeurIPS papers in 2019 and nearly half in 2022, framing the trend as a tangible senior-talent shift with implications for frontier hiring and future tracker updates.
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