Study says China leads US in workplace for AI researchers

A Carnegie China study says China employed more of the world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers in 2025 than the United States did, reversing the countries’ positions in the study’s 2022 comparison. It counted 41 researchers in China and 34 in the US last year, compared with 27 in China and 46 in the US in 2022. The figures come from a study of researchers identified through papers accepted at the 2025 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, known as NeurIPS. The study reportedly examined 10,280 researchers, about 40% of authors accepted to the conference. Its findings reflect that selection method and the study’s definitions; the underlying dataset and detailed denominators were not provided in the reports. The study also reported a shift in researchers’ educational backgrounds. In 2025, 57 tracked researchers had undergraduate degrees from China, compared with 13 who had undergraduate degrees from the US. The corresponding count for China in 2022 was 11, according to the study. Those figures describe undergraduate education, not necessarily researchers’ current workplace or nationality.