China keeps more AI talent at home, but foreign recruitment still lags
China is becoming stronger at keeping homegrown AI researchers, but it still attracts far fewer foreign researchers than the United States, limiting the payoff from its talent push. Carnegie’s study tracks authors of papers accepted at NeurIPS, a leading AI conference: in 2025, China-based researchers made up 41% of authors versus 34% for U.S.-based researchers, while talent flows between the countries still ran about 30 to 1 toward the United States. China’s domestic base is growing, but grants and visas have not made it the global magnet it wants to be.