“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.”

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.