Additionally, in recent months, international students and researchers have been under increased pressure in the U.S. This has been particularly the case with respect to artificial intelligence. The tech community should be in an uproar over this trend. The Administration’s recent denial of a green card to Kai Chen, one of OpenAI’s top researchers behind ChatGPT, has only heightened that fear. Chen’s case highlights significant issues surrounding U.S. immigration policies and their impact on the country’s technological leadership.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and vocal advocate for stricter and more open immigration policies. He’s passionate about the need for these reforms to make the United States a magnet for high-skill immigrants. Yet in a post on X last July, he called it “critical” for the U.S. economy that we “attract and retain talent globally.” In fact, “one of the cheapest, lowest-hanging policy US wins I can possibly imagine” is to reform high-skill immigration, he said. Altman further noted that “the fact that many of the most talented people in the world want to be here is a hard-won gift; embracing them is the key to keeping it that way.”
The things that have happened to these international researchers are not one-off events. More than 1,700 international students in the U.S., many of whom are AI professionals, have recently had their visa statuses challenged. This story points to larger fears about the direction of our immigration policies across the country—policies that many feel are swinging too far toward the anti-immigrant. Researchers are now considering moving to countries with more favorable immigration systems.
For Kai Chen, an artist and University of the Arts student, coming to America has been a dream since childhood. He was instrumental to the development of GPT-4.5, one of OpenAI’s primary AI models. His recent green card denial has focused the limelight on how restricting policies can harm America’s AI leadership. Noam Brown, a principal research scientist at OpenAI, took to X to express his alarm over what happened to Chen. He continued, “It’s sad and troubling that one of the greatest AI researchers I ever worked with […] was denied a U.S. green card.”
OpenAI’s enthusiasm for welcoming the world’s best and brightest has been clear from the company’s actions during its first five years. In 2022, the nonprofit submitted more than 80 applications for H-1B visas. Since 2022, it has sponsored well over 100 of the visas. Yet these efforts are feeling the strong winds of the current immigration policy storm.
Historically, many influential figures in AI have come to the U.S. on student visas and later transitioned to work visas. In the early 2000s, Ashish Vaswani, one of the primary architects of the game-changing transformer AI model, came to the U.S. to study computer science. At the same time, Wojciech Zaremba, another co-founder of OpenAI, received his Ph.D in AI from New York University on a student visa. Indeed, a recent 2023 analysis found that 70% of full-time graduate students are international students in AI-related fields. This statistic further highlights the irreplaceable role this demographic plays in fueling U.S. innovation and economic growth.
After his green card was rejected, Kai Chen chose to go remote. He’ll be living in an Airbnb in Vancouver in the interim, while he awaits a resolution to his situation. This decision reflects the growing trend among researchers who feel compelled to seek opportunities outside the U.S. due to uncertainty in immigration policy.
Dylan Hunn, another employee at OpenAI, remarked on Chen’s contributions to the company, stating that he was “crucial” for GPT-4.5’s development. Hunn’s sentiments echo a broader concern within the tech community: that losing skilled professionals like Chen could jeopardize America’s competitive edge in AI.
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