When Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, unveiled the company’s Superintelligence Lab in June, he named 11 artificial intelligence researchers who were joining his ambitious effort to build a machine more powerful than the human brain.
All 11 were immigrants educated in other countries. Seven were born in China, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times.
Although many American executives, government officials and pundits have spent months painting China as the enemy of America’s rapid push into AI, much of the groundbreaking research emerging from the United States is driven by Chinese talent.
Two new studies show that researchers born and educated in China have for years played major roles inside leading U.S. artificial intelligence labs. They also continue to drive important AI research in industry and academia, despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and growing anti-China sentiment in Silicon Valley.
The research, from two organizations, provides a detailed look at how much the American tech industry continues to rely on engineers from China, particularly in AI. The findings also offer a more nuanced understanding of how researchers in the two countries continue to collaborate, despite increasingly heated language from Washington and Beijing.
In 2020, a study from the Paulson Institute, which promotes constructive ties between the United States and China, estimated that Chinese AI researchers accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s top AI talent. Most of those Chinese researchers worked for American companies and universities.
A new study from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shows that a vast majority of these Chinese researchers have continued to work for US institutions. Of the 100 top-tier Chinese researchers in the original study who were at US universities or companies in 2019 — three years before the arrival of ChatGPT set off the global AI boom — 87 are still doing research at US universities or companies.
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“The US AI industry is the biggest beneficiary of Chinese talent,” said Matt Sheehan, an analyst who helped write both studies. “It gets so many top-tier researchers from China who come to work in the US, study in the US and, as this study shows, stay in the US, despite all the tensions and obstacles that have been thrown at them in recent years.”
There is still significant collaboration between the two nations. A separate study from alphaXiv, a company that helps people track and use the latest AI research, shows that since 2018, joint research between America and China happens more often than collaboration between any other two nations.
Many in Silicon Valley fear that Chinese nationals could steal secrets from US companies and share them with the Chinese government. Those fears are not unfounded. In early 2023, for example, a hacker gained access to the internal messaging systems of OpenAI and stole details about the design of the company’s AI technologies.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
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But analysts like Sheehan argue that the risk of espionage is far outweighed by the benefits of hiring and collaborating with Chinese talent. They worry that if the Trump administration expands its crackdown on Chinese talent in the United States, the move could seriously harm US research.
“This is seen as a real threat to US companies’ edge in AI,” said Helen Toner, interim executive director at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Without the flow of talented Chinese researchers into the United States, Silicon Valley companies would fall behind in the global race — namely, to China.
Even before Zuckerberg started aggressively hiring for his new Superintelligence Lab, Meta’s AI efforts relied heavily on Chinese talent. New hires in Meta’s AI division are often told jokingly that there are two languages they should know. The first is Hack, the company’s in-house programming language. The second is Mandarin, according to three people familiar with the culture of the company’s AI teams.
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This year, Meta received approvals for around 6,300 H1-B visas, which allow companies to hire skilled workers from other countries. This was second only to Amazon, according to data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The company has also collaborated with Chinese organizations on at least 28 prominent research papers since 2018, according to alphaXiv.
Since 2018, companies such as Apple, Google, Intel and Salesforce have collaborated with Chinese organizations on widely read research papers, according to the new study from alphaXiv. Microsoft, which has long operated research labs in China, has collaborated with Chinese organizations more than any other company, sharing credit on at least 92 important papers.
Many Chinese researchers say studying and working in the United States has become more difficult. They often have trouble securing visas, they say, and are wary of leaving the country for fear that US officials will not let them back in.
But as the Carnegie Endowment study shows, some leading Chinese researchers have returned to institutions in China after stints with US organizations. Tensions are also rising inside some US companies. Last month, a Chinese researcher, Yao Shunyu, said in a blog post that he had left the San Francisco startup Anthropic for Google in part because company executives publicly labeled China a serious security threat.
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“I strongly disagree with the anti-China statements,” Shunyu wrote. “I believe most of the people at Anthropic will disagree with such a statement, yet I don’t think there is a way for me to stay.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
