The report finds that such collaborations facilitated human rights abuses and mass surveillance of civilians in China.
U.S. universities are “extensively” collaborating with Chinese labs on AI research, which has also facilitated transfer of sensitive U.S. tech, mass surveillance of Chinese civilians, and human rights abuses in China, including what the U.S. government has designated a genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, according to a study published by analysis firm Strategy Risks in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation.
The report, released on Dec. 8, focuses on case studies of two state-backed Chinese labs, which were found since 2020 to have coauthored almost 3,000 papers with overseas researchers, including those at elite U.S. universities receiving government grants.
It names leading universities, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Oxford, and University College London (UCL), while noting that there are more than 20 others, with funding from public institutions as well as corporations such as Amazon. The organizations did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times by the time of publication.
“This report shows that Western universities and public funders are tightly linked to China’s state-priority AI laboratories through open but poorly scrutinized collaboration,” the report reads.
“Knowledge moves seamlessly across borders, even when the receiving institutions are inseparable from an authoritarian state.”
CCP-Backed Labs
The two labs in focus are the Zhejiang Lab and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI), two “lavishly resourced, Party-supervised” institutions embedded in the regime’s surveillance state system.
Zhejiang Lab was founded in 2017 by the Zhejiang provincial government, state-run Zhejiang University, and Alibaba. It received $1.25 billion in provincial government funding between 2021 and 2023, according to the report. It also partners with several state-backed institutions, such as the CETC, which was sanctioned by the United States for building the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), the backbone of the Chinese regime’s social credit system.
SAIRI was established by Chinese state-run Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2018 and since 2020 has been run by Lu Jun, a senior scientist from the sanctioned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC). SAIRI researches computer vision, tracking, applied imaging, and other technologies that can be used to monitor groups. Its collaborators include Huawei and the Chinese Public Ministry of Security’s Third Research Institute, which is responsible for technical surveillance and digital forensics, according to the report.
In 2023, it helped develop the first AI-assisted shooting training system, and in 2024 it signed contracts with two companies—iFlytek and SenseTime—that build facial recognition and smart policing platforms. Both companies have been sanctioned for aiding the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
