Over the past few decades, China has trained an AI talent workforce for America’s benefit.
China’s education system is our talent pipeline. 56% of top AI researchers trained in China are employed in the US. They make up a large proportion of the US’s frontier AI workforce (up to 40% of employees at top US AI labs).
We lead the world’s AI industry, in large part because the smartest people in the world want to work here. Keeping that lead - and ensuring that transformative AI is incubated under institutions of democracy and freedom - requires doubling down on what’s working.
We need to steal China’s frontier AI talent.
Over the past few years, we’ve been doing the opposite. The Trump Administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has been a gift for China. Chinese enrollment in US universities (the primary pathway from China to the US) is dropping.
At the same time, China has realized the value of the experts it sends us, and is trying everything it can to claw them back. The Chinese government set up 146 recruitment centers in the US to recruit top talent. More recently there have been high-profile examples of Chinese-origin researchers being successfully poached by the CCP.
All this considered, we still retain the lion’s share of Chinese AI talent. High salaries, access to compute, and the allure of American culture make for strong reasons to remain in the US. The CCP understands this, and so has prevented AI leaders from leaving the country.
But we can’t continue to sleepwalk. In a world where China (and other countries around the world) are actively recruiting for international talent, we need to wake up and get serious. This means doing everything we can to steal the people we need rather than sending them away.
We’ve done this before. After World War II, the US military ran Operation Paperclip to snap up German rocket scientists before the Soviets could. But this time, rather than relying on extensive government recruitment infrastructure, we can do what we do best: Leave it to the private sector.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and co. are ravenous for top talent, throwing around hundreds of millions of dollars as they raid and counter-raid each other. A nudge from the government could let them turn their impressive recruiting apparatus full-throttle towards China.
Some specific ideas that we could pursue:
Create a rapid path to green cards for Chinese nationals. Due to green card backlogs, Chinese typically have to wait a minimum 3 years to get permanent residency. This lack of certainty around long-term residency deters some from even attempting. Frontier companies could be allocated 10 fast-pass green cards each that they could give to top Chinese hires. Applicants would still go through the standard background checks, but would be freed from waiting in a queue.
Guarantee safety for extended families. Some Chinese AI researchers worry about the safety of their family at home if they are seen to have defected to the US. For sufficiently high-skilled individuals, giving a path to US permanent residency for their extended family (including grandparents, and siblings not covered under current green card rules) could entice some experts who would otherwise remain in China.
Explicitly signal support for companies poaching top talent from China. Sometimes, what the White House says sometimes matters just as much as what it actually does. The broadly anti-immigrant, anti-China posture of the US government leads companies to hesitate to hire China-based Chinese nationals, worried about visa friction. Even a presidential proclamation without any teeth saying, in effect, “go ahead” could create confidence needed for companies to plumb the Chinese talent pool.
These recommendations would unleash the effective and well-funded recruiting arms of top AI companies to raid Chinese talent. And of course, any mechanism extended to for-profit companies could also be made available for the military and national labs.
These specific measures are tall asks, as the creation of new green card categories would require an Act of Congress. But even partial measures would move the needle: The White House could, for example, unilaterally begin allocating H-1Bs via compensation-based ranking rather than lottery. This would give top labs the ability to hire top Chinese researchers with near-certainty.
The point is that, to date, we have been insufficiently ambitious. Critical talent matters now more than ever. We aren’t even trying to go get it. Instead of complaining about competition with foreign workers, we should be plundering China for its brilliant scientists and enlisting them into the service of American capitalism.
Thanks to Mike Riggs for comments and discussion on this post. An earlier version of this post incorrectly said that 72% of China-educated AI researchers work in the US - the actual number is 56%.
I came for the Nic Cage meme, I stayed for the great post.
I think proposals in this vein would need to address concerns about possible espionage/IP theft by Chinese staff at frontier labs (or in the military, which you suggest could also absorb Chinese talent). These staff would likely be a target for Chinese intelligence services.
Also curious what’s the source for “72% of AI researchers trained in China are employed in the US”?