President Donald Trump has made keeping China out of America's most advanced technology central to his strategy to win the AI race. But as he prepares to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, the United States is facing a problem of its own making: Some of the researchers helping drive America's AI advantage came from China. Xi arrives at the White House on September 24 for a state visit where artificial intelligence will be among the dominant subjects.
Washington and Beijing have spent weeks discussing whether to fold a long-delayed intergovernmental AI dialogue, agreed to at the two leaders' May meeting in Beijing, into a broader economic session held in the days beforehand. Trump has described the competition in absolute terms. "WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!" he posted to Truth Social this week, arguing that guardrails on the technology would serve Beijing's interests.
That advantage relies heavily on foreign-born talent, and China is one of the countries clawing some of it back. Yao Shunyu, a Tsinghua- and Princeton-trained researcher who left OpenAI in 2025 to join Tencent, was named the company's chief AI scientist three months later. He is now pushing for China to build up its own long-term AI research.
"My personal goal is that in China we should establish a long-term AGI organization," Yao said in remarks CNBC translated from Mandarin. Another case is Yang Zhilin. He finished his undergraduate degree at Tsinghua University in 2015, earned a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University, and returned to China in 2023 to found Moonshot AI.
The company has since raised more than a billion dollars and released the Kimi model series, now among the strongest open-source models available, with American startups building on Kimi and Alibaba's Qwen for reasons of cost and performance. Years of friction preceded moves like theirs. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a study by senior fellow Matt Sheehan and research assistant Sophie Zhuang, describes visa uncertainty, indictments that later collapsed and a broad sense of suspicion as conditions that accumulated after 2018.
"The reasons why any individual researcher returns home are varied and often personal," Sheehan and Zhuang wrote. "But the recent geopolitical tumult has created new obstacles and pressures for Chinese researchers who want to remain in the United States." Carnegie tracked 100 top-tier Chinese-origin AI researchers working at U.S. institutions in 2019 and found that 10 had moved to Chinese companies or universities by 2025. The 10 were not minor figures.
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