The US and China Are Collaborating More Closely on AI Than You Think

WIRED analyzed more than 5,000 papers from NeurIPS using OpenAI’s Codex to understand the areas where the US and China actually work together on AI research.

The US and China are, by many measures, archrivals in the field of artificial intelligence, with companies racing to outdo each other on algorithms, models, and specialized silicon. And yet, the world’s AI superpowers still collaborate 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 premier conference, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), reveals a significant amount of collaboration between US and Chinese labs.

The analysis found that 141 out of the 5,290 total papers (roughly 3 percent) involve collaboration between authors affiliated with US institutions and those affiliated with Chinese ones. US-China collaboration appears fairly constant, too, with 134 out of ...