US Science Talent Flight Becomes China's Recruiting Case

The institutional damage is not measured only by who leaves. It is measured by the story their departure lets rivals tell. The Bluesky framing ties policy hostility, commercial acceleration, and scientific exit into one indictment ^[1], while the external analysis places the movement inside a concrete cross-border hiring pattern through researchers joining Chinese institutions. For AI science, that turns research climate into infrastructure: the labs that keep people gain compounding advantage before the next grant cycle begins.