NYT: China Struggles to Recruit Foreign AI Researchers Despite Its 41% Share of Top Talent

The New York Times reports that for every 30 Chinese AI researchers in the US in 2025, only one in China made the opposite journey, underscoring a lopsided talent flow despite Beijing's push for sovereign AI capability. China now hosts 41% of top AI researchers by NeurIPS metric (up from 27% in 2022) while the US fell from 46% to 34%, but foreign recruits cite language, academic-freedom concerns and geopolitical tensions as barriers. At DeepSeek, 53.5% of affiliated authors had never studied or worked outside China.