Carnegie report: China tops US as the No. 1 workplace for elite AI researchers
A Carnegie China report released on 23 September, "Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race?", tracked the CVs of 10,280 authors of NeurIPS 2025 papers and found that about 41% of top AI researchers worked in China in 2025 (the report's figure is 40.6%) versus 34% in the US (34.2%), compared with 27% against 46% three years earlier. The same report says the US still had a net inflow of 2,145 researchers while China had a net outflow of 1,729, that China's retention of its own top researchers rose from 57% to 69%, and that roughly 98% of China-based top researchers did their undergraduate studies in China versus only about a third of US-based ones in the US. Peking University topped the institutional ranking for the first time, followed by Tsinghua University, KAIST and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, while 2022 leader Google slipped amid a reported six-month publication ban on strategic generative AI papers; the report acknowledges its sample skews academic and may undercount industry.
Where elite AI researchers are trained and choose to stay shapes labs' hiring pipelines and open-source output, though the report's academic-publication sample leaves industry trends unclear.