Misleading claim , you could have spent three minutes searching on ChatGPT to realize that you're missing out on all the Chinese startups.

But this isn’t a story of the US suddenly losing its ability to attract talent. The US still has by far the largest net talent gain: +2,145 in Carnegie’s sample. China is at -1,729. What changed is that China now produces so much AI talent, and retains much more of it, that both things can be true at once.

This might be the most interesting number in the whole report: 3,619 researchers followed a China → China → China path: Chinese undergrad, Chinese grad school, now working in China. China → US → US: 1,071 US → US → US: 1,093 The domestic Chinese AI pipeline is now enormous.

China has now overtaken the US as the main place these researchers work. 2022: 🇺🇸 46.4% 🇨🇳 27.1% 2025: 🇨🇳 40.6% 🇺🇸 34.2% That’s a massive shift in just three years. The old picture of China producing talent that mostly ends up in the US is increasingly outdated.

Carnegie just dropped its new AI Talent Tracker and the shift since 2022 is pretty striking. Among the NeurIPS researchers in its sample, 57.4% did their undergrad in China, up from 46.3% in 2022. The US fell from 19.8% to 13.3%. But the more interesting change is where they now work