Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a disruptive technology, promising to grant a significant economic and strategic advantage to the nations that harness its power. China, with its recent push towards AI adoption, is challenging the U.S.'s position as the global leader in this field. Given AI's massive potential, as well as the fierce geopolitical tensions between the two nations, a number of policies have been put in place that discourage AI scientists from migrating to, or collaborating with, the other country. However, the extents of such brain drain and cross-border collaboration are not fully understood. Here, we analyze a dataset of over 350,000 AI scientists and 5,000,000 AI papers. We find that, since the year 2000, China and the U.S. have been leading the field in terms of impact, novelty, productivity, and workforce. Most AI scientists who migrate to China come from the U.S., and most who migrate to the U.S. come from China, highlighting a notable brain drain in both directions. Upon migrating from one country to the other, scientists continue to collaborate frequently with the origin country. Although the number of collaborations between the two countries has been increasing since the dawn of the millennium, such collaborations continue to be relatively rare. A matching experiment reveals that the two countries have always been more impactful when collaborating than when each of them works without the other. These findings suggest that instead of suppressing cross-border migration and collaboration between the two nations, the field could benefit from promoting such activities.

翻译：人工智能（AI）已成为颠覆性技术，有望为掌握其力量的国家带来显著的经济和战略优势。随着中国近年来大力推进人工智能应用，它正在挑战美国在该领域的全球领先地位。鉴于人工智能的巨大潜力以及两国间紧张的地缘政治局势，一些政策已被实施，以阻止人工智能科学家移居或与对方国家合作。然而，这种人才流失和跨境合作的程度尚不完全清楚。在此，我们分析了一个包含超过35万名人工智能科学家和500万篇人工智能论文的数据集。我们发现，自2000年以来，中国和美国在影响力、新颖性、生产力和人才队伍方面一直处于该领域的前沿。移居中国的人工智能科学家大多来自美国，而移居美国的人工智能科学家也大多来自中国，这凸显了显著的双向人才流失。当科学家从一国移居到另一国后，他们经常继续与原籍国合作。尽管自千禧年以来两国的合作数量一直在增加，但这种合作仍然相对稀少。一项匹配实验表明，两国在合作时始终比各自独立工作时更具影响力。这些发现表明，该领域不应抑制两国间的跨境移民和合作，而应从中受益，促进此类活动。