Last week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cut ties with telecoms group Huawei and launched an “elevated risk” review process for its Chinese collaborations. The US government is currently debating whether research collaborations, particularly in sensitive areas such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality, should be subject to harsher export controls.Īdam Segal, director of cyber space policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, said: “US-China academic partnerships are increasingly under the microscope as the FBI focuses on the threat of espionage from students and scientists, and the Defense Department on the possibility that frontier technologies might eventually make their way to the PLA. “The government is using these technologies to build surveillance systems and to detain minorities ,” she added.

Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the New America think-tank and a China tech policy expert, said the papers raised “red flags because of the nature of the technology, the author affiliations, combined with what we know about how this technology is being deployed in China right now”. Three papers, published between March and November last year, were co-written by academics at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing and researchers with affiliations to China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDR), which is controlled by China’s top military body, the Central Military Commission. Microsoft has been working with a Chinese military-run university on artificial intelligence research that could be used for surveillance and censorship.

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