Carnegie report traces 57% of elite AI researchers to Chinese degrees
The share of top AI researchers who took an undergraduate degree in China rose from 27 percent in 2022, the report says.
A report published this week by Carnegie China said 57 percent of the world's elite AI researchers took their undergraduate degree in China in 2025, against 27 percent in 2022. The share holding a US undergraduate degree fell from 46 percent to 13 percent over the same three years.
The report is the work of Damien Ma and Binyi Yang. Two accounts circulated the figures on Wednesday. The researcher Kyle Chan linked the report itself. The account teortaxesTex posted a different pair of numbers, giving the 2022 Chinese share as 46 percent and the US share as 20 percent. The report's own figures are 27 and 46.
Where researchers trained and where they work are separate counts. The report put 41 percent of AI researchers working in the United States in 2025 against 34 percent in China, and said Chinese retention rose from 57 percent in 2022 to 69 percent in 2025. US retention was 89 percent.
The flow still runs one way, the report said, counting 30 China-origin researchers working in the United States for every one US-origin researcher working in China. Origin here means the country of a researcher's undergraduate degree, a proxy that may not match nationality or where someone grew up.
The report also gives a net US gain of 2,145 researchers in 2025 and a net Chinese loss of 1,729. It sets those counts beside the rising Chinese retention figure without reconciling the two in its summary, and does not say how the researcher sample was drawn.