Ten fast reads before you dive in.

The atlas is not a leaderboard first. These claims summarize the tracked public dataset as of the latest source pass, so treat counts as directional and click through when something needs proof.

Tsinghua connections

Tsinghua has the most researcher links.

Tsinghua has 27 affiliations in the network, more than the next three schools combined.

11+

MSRA alumni

MSRA is the top Western-lab link.

MSRA appears in more China foundation-model leadership paths than any other Western lab.

Yao Class

Tsinghua IIIS

Tsinghua's Yao Class appears across top teams.

The elite Tsinghua CS track shows up repeatedly across StepFun, Tencent, Meta MSL, and related leadership paths.

7 -> 5

Beijing labs (active)

Beijing has seven tracked labs, five still active at the frontier or platform layer.

Beijing still has the densest lab cluster, even after 01.AI and Baichuan left the general frontier race.

Founder without a Western lineage

Liang Wenfeng has no tracked US lab stop.

DeepSeek's founder is the rare top-lab founder with no tracked US or Western-lab stop.

Single-source founding teams

Three labs came from tight prior-employer clusters.

Baichuan, MiniMax, and StepFun each show tight founding links to prior employers.

7 / 11

Meta MSL hires

Meta MSL hired several Chinese-origin researchers.

Meta MSL's first public hires included several Chinese-origin researchers from OpenAI, Apple, DeepMind, and Anthropic.

Alibaba investments

Alibaba has the widest investor footprint.

Alibaba backed five tracked labs and later absorbed 01.AI's model and infrastructure teams.

Senior US lab returns in 2025-26

Several senior US-lab researchers returned in 2025-26.

2025-26 brought visible senior returns from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft, and MSRA-linked paths.

2 of 12

Frontier exits

01.AI and Baichuan have left frontier-model work.

01.AI moved into Alibaba's orbit; Baichuan pivoted to healthcare. The active frontier field is smaller than the headline count.