By Will Knight
Publication Date: 2026-01-21 19:00:00
The USA and China is in many ways an arch-rival in the field of artificial intelligence, with companies vying to outdo each other in algorithms, models and specialized silicon. And yet the world’s AI superpowers are still collaborating to a surprising degree when it comes to cutting-edge research.
A WIRED analysis of more than 5,000 AI research papers presented last month at the industry’s leading conference, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), shows significant collaboration between U.S. and Chinese laboratories.
The analysis found that 141 of the total 5,290 articles (approximately 3 percent) involved collaborations between authors affiliated with U.S. institutions and those affiliated with Chinese institutions. Collaboration between the US and China also appears to be fairly consistent: in 2024, 134 of a total of 4,497 articles were contributed by authors from institutions in both countries.
WIRED also examined how algorithms and models developed in one country are shared and adapted across the Pacific. The…
