Source: Damien Ma and Binyi Yang, “Who’s Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race?” (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 23, 2026).
Commentary: China has become the world’s dominant training ground for elite artificial intelligence (AI) talent. Using authors from the Neural Information Processing Systems conference as a sample, the authors of this study on AI talent found that, in 2025, 57 percent of the world’s top AI researchers received their undergraduate degrees in China, up from 46 percent in 2022. The United States accounted for just 13 percent. Yet the United States continues to benefit from China’s enormous AI talent pipeline. It remains the leading destination for researchers from around the world and gained a net 2,145 top AI researchers in 2025, while China lost a net 1,729.
That advantage may become harder for the United States to sustain as China becomes better at keeping its homegrown researchers. In 2022, just 57 percent of Chinese-origin AI researchers worked in China; by 2025, that share had climbed to 69 percent. Although that remains well below the 89 percent of U.S.-origin researchers who stay in the United States, the trend suggests that China is increasingly converting its enormous talent pipeline into a domestic AI workforce. As China simultaneously produces the majority of the world’s elite AI talent and retains more of it at home, the global competition for AI leadership will increasingly depend not just on who develops top researchers, but on where those researchers ultimately choose to work.
