China tells its AI leaders to avoid US travel over security concerns, WSJ reports

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(Reuters) -Chinese authorities are instructing the country’s top artificial intelligence entrepreneurs and researchers to avoid travel to the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The authorities are concerned that Chinese AI experts traveling abroad could divulge confidential information about the nation’s progress, the newspaper said.

Authorities also fear that executives could be detained and used as a bargaining chip in U.S.-China negotiations, the Journal said, drawing parallels to the detention of a Huawei executive in Canada at Washington’s request during the first Trump administration.

The U.S. and China are locked in a global AI race, with Chinese startup DeepSeek recently launching AI models that it claims rival or surpass U.S. industry leaders such as OpenAI and Alphabet Inc’s Google, at significantly lower cost.

The White House and China’s State Council Information Office, which handles media enquiries on behalf of the government, did not immediately respond to requests from Reuters for comment.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told a meeting of top Communist Party officials on Friday to improve China’s overall security, including in the realms of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, China’s state broadcaster reported on Saturday.

“We should give top priority to defending the country’s political security,” Xi was quoted as having told other members of the governing Politburo.

Last month, the Chinese leader held a rare meeting with some of the biggest names in the world’s second-largest economy’s technology sector, urging them to “show their talent” and be confident in the power of China’s model and market.

Chinese executives who choose to travel are instructed to report their plans before leaving and, upon returning, to brief authorities on what they did and whom they met, the Journal report said.

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng declined an invitation to attend an AI summit in Paris in February, according to the report. Another founder of a major Chinese AI startup cancelled a planned U.S. trip last year following instructions from Beijing, the Journal added.

(Reporting by Nilutpal Timsina in Bengaluru and Joe Cash in Beijing; Editing by William Mallard, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Muralikumar Anantharaman)