Chinese researchers and companies were front and center at NeurIPS in San Diego, one of the world’s top three international conferences on artificial intelligence, underscoring the deep ties between research communities in the US and China, along with the political risks those connections now face.
A graduate student from the University of Toronto researching ways to use AI in biology visited ByteDance’s booth at the recent event, saying it is “one of a few companies that works on using AI for accelerating science discovery.”
ByteDance was a top-tier sponsor and had a recruiting booth at the event, which has become a place for AI companies to scout promising talent.
While ByteDance is best known to consumers as the company behind TikTok, its “AI for Science” program engages in a broad range of basic research, including developing foundation models for biological and materials sciences. It has offices in San Jose, California; and Seattle, Washington; as well as Beijing, and recruiters at the event spoke in both English and Chinese.
The 2025 NeurIPS conference had roughly 25,000 attendees, more than six times the 2015 figure. The number of papers submitted jumped 38% on the year to 21,575, with 5,290 accepted. Chinese institutions were among the biggest sources of papers.
The top affiliation among authors of papers accepted by NeurIPS in 2025 was Tsinghua University, according to data from AI World, which is affiliated with a European think tank. While Google ranked second, Peking University and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences took the next two spots.
One of the top papers was led by a researcher from the team at Alibaba Group Holding developing the Qwen family of large language models.
US companies and institutions rely heavily on talent from China. According to a study by the Paulson Institute, 38% of top AI researchers at US organizations in 2022 had graduated from Chinese universities. Many moved to the US for advanced education and were then hired by American companies. OpenAI, Google, and Meta have many Chinese employees working on AI development.
It is “honestly quite surprising” how well the US has done in retaining this talent, said Matt Sheehan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Sheehan followed the careers of 100 Chinese researchers affiliated with US organizations who had papers accepted at NeurIPS in 2019. As of 2025, 87 were still in the US, while ten had returned to China and three had moved elsewhere. This speaks to the US’s “staying power as a magnet for top-tier researchers,” Sheehan said.
But as tensions between the US and China over AI escalate, Chinese students and researchers are in an increasingly unstable position. US President Donald Trump’s administration has tightened visa issuance for immigrants and international students, and begun revoking visas of Chinese students with ties to China’s government.
A Chinese doctoral student attending the University of Texas at Austin expressed concern. “O-1 visa holders should be OK, but I’m not sure what Trump” will do, the student said, referring to visas for those with extraordinary ability.
A Chinese student from the University of Florida, who is researching advanced sensors with military applications, is debating whether to seek permanent residency and get a job at a US defense technology company. “I feel the atmosphere toward China has become tense,” the student said.
Distrust of the US government is leading to uncertainty about working at US companies. “I can work on the frontier of AI development back in China, too,” said a Chinese student at Princeton considering taking a job at ByteDance.
Companies such as Microsoft have AI research facilities in Beijing. But “I heard a rumor that you cannot use the same cloud services as in the US,” the student said. “If so, it makes more sense to go to Chinese companies right away.”
Chinese players see the situation as an opportunity to bring back talented Chinese graduates of US universities. And ByteDance is not alone. At NeurIPS, Ant Group, Taobao, short-form video platform Kuaishou Technology, and others all had corporate booths, looking to recruit returnees.
“Five or ten years ago, if you wanted to do the best AI research, you had to come to the United States,” Sheehan said. “There were some opportunities in China, but there were very few opportunities to work at the forefront of AI in China. In 2025, there’s lots of opportunities to work at the forefront of AI in China.”
The University of Texas doctoral student said: “From what I see among the AI researchers around me, 70% stay in the US, while 30% return to China.”
Returnees from the US are already leading AI development efforts in China. Yang Zhilin, CEO of “AI tiger” Moonshot AI, earned his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University before returning to China to found the company.
More recently, Yao Shunyu, a top researcher at OpenAI, moved to Tencent Holdings, where he was appointed chief AI scientist.
“We cannot know what percentage of people are doing economic espionage,” Sheehan said. “But when you just look at the sheer size of the contribution [from Chinese researchers], it’s very difficult to imagine that anything that is taken away or stolen from the US could match the size of the contribution. We’re talking about one-quarter to one-third of the US AI research being done by these Chinese researchers.”
The government should make it easier for Chinese nationals with doctorates to work in the US, he said.
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.