SHANGHAI, CHINA – JULY 27: An “electrician” robot of China Southern Power Grid shows its skills during the 2025 World AI Conference (WAIC) and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance at Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center on July 27, 2025 in Shanghai, China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
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People drive prosperity, always and everywhere. The previous truth rates serious thought as much more stringent visa restrictions from the Trump administration render it more difficult for talented foreign students to study and work in the United States.
It recalls a decades-old quip from Bill Gates that Goldman Sachs was Microsoft’s biggest competitor. As Gates saw it, a failure within Microsoft when it came to beating Goldman in the battle for talent would reflect in reduced performance.
Gates’s observation isn’t being heeded sufficiently in the present political environment. While President Trump recently asserted at the recent United Nations General Assembly that “Whoever wins super intelligence wins,” his administration’s policies with regard to foreign talent haven’t matched his rhetoric.
Presently the Trump administration has an 85,000 per worker cap on H-1B work visas that is wholly insufficient relative to demand from U.S. technology companies, and would-be foreign workers alike when it comes to talent inflows into the U.S. Factor in greater barriers to immigration more broadly, and foreign technology talent essential for artificial intelligence (AI) or “super intelligence” advance stateside has begun to look elsewhere for study and work opportunities.
To which some will say that’s ok, the U.S. is well stocked with domestic technological talent. No doubt that was true when Bill Gates viewed Goldman Sachs as Microsoft’s biggest competitor for superstar workers, and it was arguably truer just a few years ago. But no longer.
For evidence, consider the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, known as NeurIPS (formerly NIPS). The latter is broadly seen as the most highly regarded annual meeting of academic types focused on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computational neuroscience. According to a recent report published at Carnegie China, “authors whose papers are accepted at the conference are still considered elite research talent—the “Navy Seals” of the field.” So far, so good. But for one thing.
The study reveals that “China has established a commanding lead as the largest originating source of elite AI talent globally.” Which on its own is not a bad thing.
For one, work divided among talented people remains the greatest source of progress. And this progress doesn’t cease just because the labor division spans countries instead of nations. It’s useful to add that that while the greatest minds of Chinese AI have gradually kept their skills in China, the report clarifies that there remains a “still largely a one-way flow of talent” into the United States.
Still, the migration of elite Chinese AI talent into the U.S. has undeniably slowed. Sad about this is that the reduced flow isn’t reflective of a shrunken desire among Chinese tech elites to showcase their skills on the world’s biggest technology stage, rather the Carnegie China report indicates that a reduced talent inflow that has long favored the United States is a consequence of it being “harder” Chinese students “to come to the United States as a result of tighter visa restrictions, particularly for Chinese graduate students in STEM fields.”
So, while it’s undeniably true that major technological strides in China broadly, and in AI specifically, have created a greater incentive for top Chinese AI minds to remain in China for studies and work, the unseen in all this is substantive.
Specifically, what would the talent inflows into the U.S. from China look like absent the restrictions? It’s a question worth asking, particularly as the so-called “war” for AI supremacy between the U.S. and China continues. How unfortunate if the U.S. loses not because it’s not competitive, but because politics needlessly got in the way.
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