By Gao Yun
A new research report finds that several top U.S. universities—including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton—have maintained cooperative relationships in recent years with Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) laboratories that are deeply involved in the country’s national surveillance system. In some cases, these collaborations even produced thousands of joint academic papers with institutions that assist the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in suppressing Uyghur Muslims.
According to Fox News, the report was jointly released on Monday, Dec. 8, by Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation. The report shows that since 2020, two Chinese laboratories backed by state power—the Zhejiang Lab and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI)—have co-authored approximately 3,000 academic papers with Western researchers.
More critically, both laboratories have direct ties to China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a core entity within the CCP’s military-industrial system. CETC built the Xinjiang surveillance platform that has long been used to facilitate the large-scale repression of Uyghur Muslims—an effort that both the Trump and Biden administrations have officially designated as “genocide.”
Laboratories deeply embedded in the CCP surveillance machine
The report states that these two labs are not only involved in domestic surveillance technology development but also collaborate with the Ministry of Public Security’s Third Research Institute. This institute specializes in technical investigations and digital forensics and is one of the CCP’s key agencies for technological surveillance of the public.
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Technologies developed through these collaborations—including multi-target tracking, gait recognition, and infrared detection—are widely used to monitor protesters, track dissidents, and strengthen the regime’s social control network.
Strategy Risks stated that with Western support and U.S. government research funding, these technologies ultimately became tools for the CCP’s mass surveillance and human rights abuses, while also accelerating the outflow of sensitive U.S. technologies into China’s security system.
The authors emphasized that the core problem is not traditional espionage, but rather that Western academic institutions have treated laboratories closely tied to the CCP’s security apparatus as “normal research partners,” turning a blind eye to how the regime uses AI to suppress its own people.
The report stresses that there are no research institutions in China independent of CCP control. Laws such as the National Security Law, Intelligence Law, Cybersecurity Law, and Data Security Law mandate that all organizations cooperate with the regime’s intelligence system. This means that any international research can be directly absorbed into the CCP’s surveillance machinery and ultimately used to suppress the population.
Western universities’ silence on China’s AI-enabled repression
Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation, told Fox News that the findings reveal a shocking reality: Western AI academia and ethics organizations have largely remained silent on how the CCP uses artificial intelligence to oppress its own citizens.
He criticized many institutions for completely avoiding China’s human rights issues, often due to financial incentives that discourage anyone from challenging the CCP. The Human Rights Foundation’s AI initiative, he said, aims to expose this hypocrisy, promote research into authoritarian abuse of AI, and support tools that protect privacy and defend freedom.
The report specifically names Oxford University, Cambridge University, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley, noting that between 2020 and 2025 these institutions almost never spoke out against the CCP’s AI-driven repression, yet continued to collaborate with Chinese laboratories. During that same period, only two international organizations publicly condemned Beijing’s actions.
READ MORE: The Political Fragmentation Inside Xi Jinping’s China
US taxpayer money may be fueling CCP surveillance
The report also reveals that many joint U.S.-China research papers list funding from agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), DARPA, and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
This means that U.S. taxpayer-funded research money may have unknowingly become “external fuel” for the CCP’s surveillance system.
The research team stated: “This exposes a major vulnerability in the Western research ecosystem, showing that it has almost no effective safeguards to prevent technology from being used for human rights abuses.”
The report reviews how over the past decade China has built the world’s largest digital surveillance system in Xinjiang. More than one million Uyghur Muslims have been detained, subjected to forced labor and political re-education, and placed under near-total surveillance. The system can track individuals’ faces, voices, movements, and even biometric data.
The study notes: “The CCP has systematically deployed surveillance technologies to suppress rights defenders, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents, with Uyghurs and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang being the primary targets.”
The report warns that without new enforcement mechanisms and transparency requirements, Western universities and public research institutions will continue to unintentionally supply critical technological breakthroughs to the CCP’s surveillance system.
The research team calls for mandatory human-rights due diligence for all international research collaborations, full disclosure of partner institutions and co-authors, and a clear ban on cooperation with laboratories deeply involved in the CCP’s surveillance apparatus.
