Craig S. Smith, born on October 13, 1955, in Spokane, Washington, is an American journalist and former executive at The New York Times. Until January 2000, he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, notably covering the rise of the Falun Gong movement in China. In 2000, he joined The New York Times as the Shanghai bureau chief, reporting extensively on the practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners in China.In 2002, Smith moved to Paris and reported from over forty countries, including Iraq, Israel, and Kyrgyzstan. He covered significant conflicts such as the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the 2003 Iraq War, and the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese War, as well as the 2005 unrest in the French banlieues. In 2008, he became the executive editor of a financial news venture by Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li Tzar Kai and later served as senior vice president of Li’s Pacific Century Group. Smith returned to The New York Times in late 2011 as China managing director, where he founded and ran their first foreign language site, cn.nytimes.com.
In late 2016, he came back to the U.S. as a writer at large for the Times, focusing on Canadian stories, before retiring in 2018. He now writes about artificial intelligence for the Times and other publications. Additionally, he served as a special government employee for the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and hosts the podcast “Eye on AI,” which is ranked number 2 among AI-related podcasts by Feedspot.
