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.
“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”.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
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.
The debate took centre stage at Thursday’s hearing, as US senator Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican and the committee’s chair, saw a key “flaw” in the proposal to lure tech talent from the mainland.
“When a student comes over here, they got to go back,” Risch said.
“If they don’t go back, there’s a family there. And we all know what the Chinese government does to families,” he added, alluding to instances in which Beijing has pressured overseas Chinese nationals by targeting their relatives on the mainland.
Other witnesses on Thursday stressed that the US government needed to focus on challenging China’s growing tech capabilities by insulating American academia and the broader information space from Chinese influence, rather than recruiting talent from the mainland.
“The scale and scope of China’s predations in our research ecosystem are largely unknown,” said Jeffrey Stoff of the Virginia-based Centre for Research Security and Integrity.
The State Department should “play a much larger role” in closing regulatory gaps and bolstering compliance mechanisms to “ensure that real costs are imposed to the PRC when it violates commonly accepted norms and values of scientific research”, Stoff added.
Leaders of the House Select Committee on China have urged Mike Waltz, the US national security adviser, to review the benefits of placing export controls on chips critical to DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure. Photo: AFP alt=Leaders of the House Select Committee on China have urged Mike Waltz, the US national security adviser, to review the benefits of placing export controls on chips critical to DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure. Photo: AFP>
Asked by Nebraska Republican Pete Ricketts what the US should do in response to the rise of Chinese platforms like DeepSeek and RedNote, Peter Mattis of the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank, recommended that Washington take the same approach it did with Chinese-owned short-video app TikTok.
TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance, has been removed from US app stores as it faces a potential ban in the US on fears that Beijing may collect data from the app and manipulate its content. The popular app’s temporary halt in service earlier this month led American users to flock to RedNote, China’s version of Instagram.
“You have to adopt the same approach that was applied to TikTok: that it either is sort of removed from [Chinese] control or it is no longer available in the app stores,” said Mattis, contending that DeepSeek raises similar national security concerns.
Earlier this week, the emergence of Hangzhou-based DeepSeek sent share prices tumbling for semiconductor giant Nvidia and other major American tech companies.
Over the past few weeks, DeepSeek released two powerful new AI models built at a fraction of the cost and computing power used by American firms to create the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT.
Unease about DeepSeek came from other parts of the US Congress on Thursday.
In a letter to US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, the leaders of the House Select Committee on China – Republican John Moolenaar of Michigan and Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois – pushed him to review the national security benefits of placing export controls on chips critical to DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure.
“Export controls and AI innovation are not mutually exclusive but two sides of the same coin,” said Krishnamoorthi. “If we want to outcompete the CCP in AI, we must protect our lead, safeguard Americans’ data and use common sense.”
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
