Most of America’s Top AI Companies Were Founded by Immigrants

High-skilled immigration has long been a key driver of US technological leadership. This is especially true today — with immigrant entrepreneurs powering American AI dominance. Our new research shows that 60% of the top US-based AI companies have at least one immigrant founder.

The analysis draws from the new 2025 Forbes “AI 50” list of top startups developing promising AI applications. 42 of the 2025 list were US-based companies, 25 of which were founded or cofounded by immigrants. For instance, OpenAI — creator of ChatGPT and other groundbreaking tools — includes among its founders Elon Musk (born in South Africa), Ilya Sutskever (Soviet Union), and Wojciech Zaremba (Poland). Anthropic’s founders include Jack Clark (born in the UK). 

Many founders arrived as students and stayed to build companies that now power AI tools across sectors. In 2020, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University found over 70% of immigrant founders of top US-based AI startups first came to the United States on student visas.¹

Founders hail from 25 countries, with India leading (nine founders), followed by China (eight founders) and then France (three founders). Australia, the UK, Israel, Romania, Canada, and Chile all have two founders each.

This is not a new pattern. The National Foundation for American Policy studied the AI 50 list for 2023, finding that immigrants founded 65% of the companies on 2023’s list.² The Center for Security and Emerging Technology also analyzed the 2019 list, finding 66% of companies had immigrant founders.³ 

And the impact of immigrant founders extends beyond the startup ecosystem. Jensen Huang (Taiwan), CEO of NVIDIA, and Lisa Su (Taiwan), CEO of AMD, lead two of the world’s most important AI chipmakers. Immigrants are also key figures in AI research in academia. Kyunghyun Cho (born in South Korea) and Ion Stoica (born in Romania) have made foundational contributions to AI, including the neural network architectures behind large language models.

All these immigrants contribute to the United States’ position as the global leader in AI — but that position is not automatic or self-sustaining. Last month, Matthias Oschinski, Jacob Feldgoise, Sophie Alcorn, and I submitted a response to the Request for Information (RFI) on the Development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan, pointing out that two threats to our continued ability to retain and recruit the talent needed for US AI dominance: increasing barriers to immigration (most importantly in the form of growing wait times for green cards) and increased competition from other countries in the race for talent. Our comment offered a roadmap to cut red tape, make the immigration process more efficient, and better attract and retain AI entrepreneurs. You can read it here.

Immigrants are not just participants in the American AI sector — they are some of its architects and builders. The future of US leadership in AI may depend on how effectively it continues to embrace global talent.