For China’s leading artificial intelligence researchers and entrepreneurs, international mobility is rapidly shrinking. According to recent reports, researchers, startup founders, and executives at private companies now face travel restrictions, with some of the most prominent figures in the industry required to obtain government approval before traveling abroad. These measures reflect a broader shift in how Beijing manages the outflow of talent in the AI sector, where demand for skilled professionals to train and refine AI models has surged as the global tech industry pursues this new avenue for growth.

In March 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese authorities had been advising top AI founders and researchers to avoid traveling to the United States, signaling early on how closely Beijing now guards AI as both an economic asset and a national security priority. Restrictions have reportedly intensified following Beijing’s scrutiny of the Manus-Meta deal. According to the Financial Times, China has barred Manus’s two co-founders from leaving the country while regulators investigate whether Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of the AI startup violates Beijing’s foreign investment rules. The co-founders are now exploring options to comply with Beijing’s demand to unwind the deal, including raising roughly $1 billion from external investors to buy the company back from the social media giant.

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The AI race between the East and the West is closer than ever before. Stanford’s latest index shows that the performance gap between top U.S. and Chinese models has narrowed to just 2.7% as of March 2026, down from about 31% in 2023, raising fresh questions about how long America can maintain its lead. The United States still dominates in model quality and high-impact patents, but China is rapidly catching up—if not outpacing—American AI labs in terms of publications, citations, and patent volume.

In addition to travel restrictions, China reportedly plans to tighten oversight of U.S. capital flowing into its premier AI firms. According to Bloomberg, Beijing will require government sign-off before tech companies like Moonshot AI, StepFun, and ByteDance can accept American investment. This news follows a series of escalating economic countermeasures: in 2025, Beijing imposed two rounds of export controls on 14 rare earth materials critical to high-tech military manufacturing, and separately banned state-funded data centers from deploying foreign AI chips.