The fight for tech talent intensified this week as world leaders gathered at Davos for the World Economic Forum. Increasingly, with the rise of AI, raw talent capable of getting the job done unaided by AI has made favourable policies to attract these talents a priority for many countries.
As the United States opts to exit the stage by raising the cost of H1B visas, the UK says it would now swoop in with one of the best packages so far from a world leader: visa cost reimbursements. UK’s Chancellor Rachel Reeves told the Davos crowd that the government wants to make the UK “the first choice for top talent coming to work, study, and build businesses.”
The new visa cost reimbursement policy would apply to tech talent including researchers in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and semiconductors.
In the US, recalibrating around a visa policy that works to bring in tech talent seems to still be a pipe dream. After Anthropic’s CEO said in Davos that he had “engineers within Anthropic who say, ‘I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code. I edit it,’” critics within the US of the H1B visa seized on his comments to ask why high-skilled foreign tech talent was needed in the US since AI can now do the job.
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