Carnegie: China Passes US as Top AI Talent Hub, 40.6% to 34.2%

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says in a December 3 report that China has overtaken the United States as the top destination for elite AI researchers. The share of top-tier talent working in China rose from 27.1% in 2022 to 40.6% in 2025; the U.S. share fell from 46.4% to 34.2%. The Information carried the numbers first, by Claudia Chong, and Newsweek's summary reports the same swing.

The paper's authors, senior fellow Matt Sheehan and research assistant Sophie Zhuang, do something more concrete than a headline stat. They took 100 Chinese-origin researchers who had been working at U.S. institutions in 2019 and traced where each one had ended up six years on. 87 stayed in the United States, split between 41 at private companies, 40 at universities and 6 in doctoral or postdoctoral positions. 10 had moved to Chinese companies or universities. 3 went abroad.

"The vast majority of researchers from the dataset chose to continue working for U.S. institutions six years later," Sheehan and Zhuang write.

The 10 who did leave were not backbench. Two founded startups, two took executive positions at tech giants, five became professors. One is Yang Zhilin, the Carnegie Mellon PhD who founded Moonshot AI in China in 2023 and has since raised over $1 billion, with open-source models now adopted by U.S. startups.

The dataset is an update of the 2020 Paulson Institute Global AI Talent Tracker. Sheehan and Zhuang add that researchers originally from China were on 29% of accepted NeurIPS 2019 papers, and on nearly half of NeurIPS 2022. "Studies of the top AI research papers have shown the authors originally from China contributing as much, if not more, to American AI output than authors from the United States," they write.