The United States is losing the lead in the artificial intelligence talent search fever
By Enrique Dans | Published: 2025-10-28 17:30:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
In AI, computing and data are important, but people are even more important. Behind every breakthrough model, every leap in infrastructure, and every “revolutionary” chatbot lies a dwindling pool of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians capable of building them. The defining constraint in the next decade of AI is not just hardware: it is human capital
Across the world, a quiet arms race is taking place in that capital. The most advanced AI companies, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta, Google, and a few companies in China, are no longer just competing for customers or GPUs. They are competing for minds
The new focus of intelligence
In the past couple of years, hiring and acquisition patterns at AI companies have begun to resemble a geopolitical map. Anthropic and OpenAI are attracting entire research teams from Google or Meta with compensation packages approaching nine figures. Apple and Amazon, late to the party, buy startups not for the products, but for the engineers behind them. Venture capital no longer funds ideas so much as it funds recruitment: buying human potential before it matures elsewhere
Multiple analyzes show this Elite American programs, especially Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT It remains Dominant nutrients in frontier artificial intelligence laboratorieswhich enhances the precise concentration of expertise in a small number of companies and geographies. The result is an intellectual focus unprecedented in the history of technology.
This rally may accelerate progress in the short term. But it also increases fragility. When innovation lives within a handful of companies, the industry becomes monocultural. The same assumptions, ethical frameworks, and commercial incentives repeat themselves. Alternative approaches, such as symbolic reasoning, hybrid models, and decentralized architectures, struggle to attract interest or funding
The global scramble for minds
At the same time, countries are treating AI researchers in the same way they once treated nuclear physicists or petroleum engineers. The United Kingdom launched its project Artificial Intelligence Frontiers Task Force Special visas for senior scholars. Canada’s Global Talent Stream accelerates work permits for AI engineers in less than two weeks. France offers tax incentives and research grants to companies that locate their laboratories in Paris or Grenoble
China, facing export controls on chips, has doubled down on human intelligence as a strategic resource. Its leading universities produce tens of thousands of artificial intelligence graduates annually, many of whom train on open-weight models following restrictions imposed by Washington on the devices. As one Carnegie analyst put it: “If you can’t import computing, you’re importing talent.”
In other words: brains are the new semiconductors.
America’s self-inflicted wound
However, the United States, still home to most of the world’s largest AI companies, is busy clamping down on them. Donald Trump’s renewed hostility toward immigration includes threats to limit, suspend, or enforce immigration Charging exorbitant fees for H-1B and F-1 visasThese are the same programs through which thousands of artificial intelligence researchers enter the country every year.
The style is not new. In 2020, during his previous term, Trump signed an executive order suspending key visa categories, prompting MIT Technology Review to warn that the move “It threatened to undermine America’s progress in the field of artificial intelligence“The logic hasn’t changed. The world’s best AI researchers are disproportionately foreign: About 60% of the best AI scientists working in the United States were born abroad, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. Limiting their entry is not protectionism: it is strategic sabotage.
When talent is your biggest competitive advantage, closing the door on talent is a slow form of self-destruction.
The corporate paradox
Ironically, the companies that benefit most from global talent are also the companies that make that talent scarce. By offering astronomical salaries and exclusive contracts, they create a gravitational field that pulls expertise from universities and startups.
Academia, which has long served as an incubator for AI progress, is now bleeding researchers into industry at an unprecedented rate. The result is a research vacuum in which public institutions are no longer able to compete. Even national laboratories struggle to retain talent when private companies offer double the amount of government wages
This collective focus of minds has another cost: intellectual homogeneity. As the same people move between the same companies under the same investors, the boundaries of AI become narrower, more predictable, and less pluralistic. The next big breakthroughs may never happen, not because we lack computing, but because we have trained the global research community to think the same way.
Geopolitical stakes
For decades, the United States has dominated global innovation by acting as a talent magnet. For all their flaws, the H-1B and F-1 visa systems have succeeded in transforming American universities and technology centers into engines of discovery. This advantage is now at risk.
If Washington continues down the path of visa restrictions, and if the industry continues to hoard expertise rather than nurture it, the center of gravity for AI may shift elsewhere. Canada, the European Union and the United Arab Emirates are already competing for displaced researchers. Meanwhile, China is developing domestic alternatives at an astonishing speed.
The irony here is that America may lose the very thing that made its technological ecosystem unstoppable: openness. The more insular they become, the more they resemble the centralized systems they once out-developed.
The ethics of scarcity
The concentration of talent also raises ethical questions. When a small number of companies control the majority of global AI expertise, they effectively control which problems can be solved and which problems are ignored.
We are already seeing this bias in practice. Billions are being poured into models that improve productivity, marketing and financial forecasting, while underfunded projects in climate modeling, education and health care languish. The promise of AI to “benefit humanity” rings hollow if humanity does not have a seat at the table.
Diversity of thought, background and geography is not a moral luxury; It is a prerequisite for flexibility. Homogeneous systems fail in homogeneous ways.
A new social contract for intelligence
The solution does not lie in regulation alone, nor in market freedom alone. It is a new social contract for talent, one that treats human intelligence as a shared strategic resource, not as a proprietary asset.
This means:
- Immigration policies attract, not repel, the world’s brightest minds
- Funding mechanisms that keep public research competitive with corporate laboratories
- Ethical frameworks that prevent non-compete and exclusivity contracts from turning scientists into captives
- Global collaboration that recognizes AI as a shared infrastructure challenge, not a zero-sum race
In the twentieth century, countries competed for oil. On the 21st, they will compete for perception.
Warning and choice
The United States still has the advantage: world-class universities, deep capital markets, and a risk-taking culture. But advantages erode when arrogance replaces openness
If America turns inward, it will not only lose talent: it will lose the diversity that fuels creativity. When the next generation of scientists chooses to work in Toronto, Paris, Madrid, or Shenzhen rather than Silicon Valley, the “American century” of innovation will quietly end. Not a revolution, but a letter of resignation
Computing power, as I have said in previous articles, matters a lot, because it represents the ability to access cheap energy, or as Europe knows well, regulation. But the race for AI supremacy will not be won by computing, energy prices, or politics alone. It will be won by whoever attracts and strengthens the minds that create intelligence itself
Now these minds are watching which countries still deserve this aid
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(Tags for translation) Artificial Intelligence
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