Today, at 56, Song-Chun Zhu is one of the world’s leading authorities in artificial intelligence. In 1992, he left China for the US to pursue a PhD in computer science at Harvard. Later, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he led one of the most prolific AI research centres in the world, won numerous major awards, and attracted prestigious research grants from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. He was celebrated for his pioneering research into how machines can spot patterns in data, which helped lay the groundwork for modern AI systems such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. He and his wife, and their two US-born daughters, lived in a hilltop home on Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive. He thought he would never leave.
But in August 2020, after 28 years in the US, Zhu astonished his colleagues and friends by suddenly moving back to China, where he took up professorships at two top Beijing universities and a directorship in a state-sponsored AI institute. The Chinese media feted him as a patriot assisting the motherland in its race toward artificial intelligence. US lawmakers would later demand to know how funders such as UCLA and the Pentagon had ignored “concerning signs” of Zhu’s ties to a geopolitical rival. In 2023, Zhu became a member of China’s top political advisory body, where he proposed that China should treat AI with the same strategic urgency as a nuclear weapons programme.