Grouped by function, the fifty-five fall into eight rooms: the founders shipping frontier models, the chief scientists of the platforms, the chip and robotics companies, the surveillance firms, the investors, the professors, the state laboratories and the officials who write the rules. The rooms are small and the walls between them are thin: the same institutions — one university, one former employer, a handful of funds — recur from room to room. The full fifty-five, with biographies and sourcing, are in the appendix.
Microsoft’s basic-research laboratory in Beijing trained a generation of Chinese computer scientists — and then watched them leave to run the companies, faculties and laboratories that now define the field.
Jiang Daxin→Chief executive, StepFunKai-Fu Lee→Chief executive, 01.AIXu Li→Chief executive, SenseTimeYin Qi→Chief executive, MegviiYu Kai→Founder and chief executive, Horizon RoboticsWang Jingdong→Chief scientist, computer vision, BaiduZhou Jingren→Chief technology officer, Alibaba CloudYu Dong→Distinguished scientist, Tencent AI LabTian Qi→Chief AI scientist, HuaweiHarry Shum→Council chairman, HKUSTZhang Yaqin→Chair professor, Tsinghua UniversityWang Zhongyuan→President, Beijing Academy of AILu Qi→Founder, MiraclePlusZhang Hongjiang→Venture partner, Source Code CapitalZhipu was founded out of Tsinghua’s computer-science department — Tang Jie and Zhang Bo, its chief scientist and the oldest person on this list, are both here — and the university still holds 3.5% of the listed company. Andrew Yao runs its College of AI; five of the original fifty-two work at Tsinghua alone, and its professors sit on the government’s AI advisory bodies.
| Repeat investor | DeepSeek | Moonshot | StepFun | MiniMax | Zhipu |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TencentPlatform · runs its own frontier models | |||||
| AlibabaPlatform · runs its own frontier models | — | — | 12.6% | ||
| HongShanVenture firm · Neil Shen · ex-Sequoia China | — | ||||
| Qiming Venture PartnersVenture firm · Duane Kuang | — | — | — | ||
| 5Y CapitalVenture firm · Richard Liu | — | — | — | — | |
| Ant Group · MeituanPlatform-adjacent investors | — | — | — | — | |
| CATL · JD · NetEase · IDGJune 2026 DeepSeek round · as reported · non-voting | — | — | — | — | |
| Government bodiesFunds and partnerships, after look-through | 0.28% | 18.1% | — | — | 4.9% |
His firm, spun out of Sequoia in 2023, sits on the registers of four of the five.
Backed StepFun and Zhipu — and UBTech’s Zhou Jian, elsewhere on this list.
Backed StepFun; earlier, first institutional money into Xiaomi and an early backer of Horizon Robotics.
At DeepSeek the exposure is personal as well as corporate: WireScreen’s look-through records attribute 1.7% and 1.0% to Pony Ma and Xu Chenye, Tencent’s own founders. The three investors above were added to The Wire China’s roster by WireScreen because the original list carried only three financiers — and their firms were already on the registers of four of the five.
The two markers almost never overlap. The restricted are engineers and executives at chipmakers, surveillance firms and platform labs; the Party members are officials, laboratory directors and one chief executive. No individual on the list is personally sanctioned by the United States.
Chen Tianshi’s chip designer was added to the Commerce Department’s Entity List in 2022, which restricts exports of American technology to the firm.
SenseTime, Megvii and DeepGlint — run by three people on this list — appear on U.S. government restriction lists tied to their surveillance work.
The only one of the five AI tigers marked on the February 2025 roster. It is now listed publicly in Hong Kong.
.png){kind=small}