The US should welcome China’s best scientific minds into its universities to compete with the mainland’s success in AI, American lawmakers in Washington heard on Thursday, as Chinese start-up DeepSeek unnerved the global tech market this week.
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“Let’s steal their best engineers,” said Melanie Hart of the Washington-based Atlantic Council at a hearing convened by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Referencing the Chinese talent behind DeepSeek’s AI models, Hart testified that “we’d be better off if the engineers behind that were working here in the US”.
To achieve that, she continued, students from the mainland would need to feel safe in America, adding: “We can beat Beijing at making Chinese scientists feel safe.”
Hart’s comments came as Washington debates how best to retain top talent while safeguarding US intellectual property rights and national security.
They also coincide with a growing trend of US-based Chinese scientists returning to the mainland, driven in part by concerns of racial profiling under American national security policies and expanding opportunities in China’s tech sector.
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