US immigration crackdowns are pushing top AI talent to China
The United States may be winning battles in the AI chip war while quietly losing the more consequential fight for human talent. The Trump administration has proposed steep new fees on H-1B visas and is weighing a $100,000 charge on Optional Practical Training, the program that allowed roughly 419,000 international graduates to work in the U.S. after finishing their degrees in 2024. At the same time, the window for students to remain in the country after completing a degree has been cut from 60 days to 30, meaning students are now spending the final stretch of their doctoral programs scrambling for employment rather than thinking about how to turn their research into companies.
The consequences are already visible. Yang Zhilin earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon, interned at Google and Meta, and received a job offer from Apple, yet he returned to China to found Moonshot AI, whose Kimi K3 model is now drawing comparisons to work from OpenAI and Anthropic. Omar Yaghi, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who came to the U.S. as a refugee teenager, recently left his faculty post at UC Berkeley for Tsinghua University in Beijing. These are not isolated cases. Immigrants have received 40 percent of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000, and more than two-thirds of the small population capable of founding a frontier AI company are foreign-born. Canada, Australia, France, and China have all moved aggressively to recruit researchers unsettled by the current U.S. climate, with Canada's H-1B outreach program oversubscribed within a single day.