Experts say US is in danger of losing its status as the center of AI R&D, as GOP tax plan raises costs on graduates and immigration policy deters some
Will Knight / MIT Technology Review :
Context & Ripple Effects
Will Knight's reporting captures an early warning in what has become a decade-long pattern: experts flagging that Washington's own policy choices — a GOP tax plan that raises costs on graduates and immigration rules that deter foreign researchers — could erode the US position as the center of AI R&D. The concern lands on top of separate worries that Commerce Department export restrictions would stunt the domestic industry.
Subsequent coverage suggests the warning was not idle: by 2025, Zeki found AI talent entering the US roughly equaled talent leaving, and national-security and immigration policy were flagged as risks to access to Chinese researchers, who made up 47% of top AI researchers in 2022. Microsoft's Eric Horvitz has since warned that cuts to academic research funding could push talent abroad.
First-order effects
- Foreign STEM graduates and researchers face higher after-tax costs under the GOP plan and immigration friction, changing the calculus of staying in the US for the very people AI labs hire.
Second-order effects
- US companies competing for scarce AI talent lose access to a pipeline heavily weighted toward Chinese researchers, while rival countries gain a recruiting opening for graduates the US deters.
Third-order effects
- If tax, immigration, export-control, and research-funding policy all push the same direction, the structural risk is that AI R&D decentralizes away from the US — a shift the Zeki inflow-equals-outflow data point suggests may already be underway rather than hypothetical.
The trend: US AI leadership is being shaped less by private-sector momentum than by cumulative federal policy on taxes, immigration, exports, and research funding, with each new restriction adding to a measurable talent drain.