A sweeping new report warns that America’s top universities, including MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Princeton, have been quietly partnering with Chinese artificial intelligence labs deeply embedded in Beijing’s surveillance and security state and in some cases co-authoring thousands of papers with entities tied to oppressive efforts against Uyghur Muslims.
The report, released by Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation on Monday morning, shows that two major Chinese state-backed labs, Zhejiang Lab and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI), have co-authored roughly 3,000 papers with Western researchers since 2020.
The labs have direct ties to CETC, the CCP’s defense conglomerate that has sanctioned building the Xinjiang surveillance platform used to target Uyghur Muslims as part of an overall campaign against the group that the Biden and Trump administrations have labeled a ‘genocide.’
‘With Western support and U.S.government funding, the labs have developed technologies in multi-object tracking, gait recognition, and infrared detection,’ Strategy Risks said in a press release. ‘These collaborations facilitated human rights abuses, mass surveillance, and the transfer of sensitive U.S. technology to Chinese companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party.’
The authors stress that the core problem is not covert espionage, but the ‘shocking normalization’ of Western institutions treating Chinese security-linked labs as ordinary research partners, even though Chinese law requires all such entities to support state surveillance and intelligence efforts.
Inside China, no research entities are independent of the CCP, the study emphasizes, while explaining that China’s national security, intelligence, cybersecurity and data security laws compel all organizations, including supposedly civilian research labs, to share information with state security services, meaning Western research can be absorbed directly into systems of repression.
‘The findings show a staggering lack of interest among top Western AI ethics organizations and academic departments with respect to how the CCP weaponizes AI against its own citizens,’ Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, told Fox News Digital.
‘Often, these organizations simply refuse to address AI and Chinese human rights issues. As the report reveals, there are often financial incentives and ties that prevent anyone from speaking up. HRF’s AI program exists to call out this hypocrisy and drive new investigative research into dictators and how they abuse AI to repress their citizens, while at the same time investing in open-source privacy protecting AI tools to expand individual freedom.’
The report also criticizes leading Western AI ethics institutes, including those at Oxford, Cambridge, MIT and Berkeley, for largely remaining silent on China’s use of AI for repression from 2020 to 2025, even as their universities continued collaborations. Only two organizations publicly condemned Beijing’s practices during that period.
Over the past decade, China has built the world’s most expansive digital police state in Xinjiang, where more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been subjected to mass detention, forced labor, coercive ‘re-education’ and blanket surveillance that tracks faces, voices, movements and even biometric data.
‘The Chinese government systematically deploys surveillance technologies to target rights advocates, ethnic minorities — particularly Uyghurs and other Muslim populations in Xinjiang — and political dissidents,’ the study says.
The report concludes that without new guardrails, Western universities and public research agencies will continue supplying technical breakthroughs that ‘flow seamlessly into China’s apparatus of repression.’
The authors call for mandatory human-rights due diligence for international research partnerships, greater transparency on foreign co-authorships, and limits on collaboration with Chinese state-linked labs tied to surveillance and defense.
Fox News Digital reached out to MIT, Harvard and Princeton for comment.