NEW YORK (Dec. 8, 2025) – A report released today by Strategy Risks, in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation, reveals that leading Western universities — including MIT, Stanford, and Oxford — have collaborated extensively with Chinese AI laboratories embedded in the country’s surveillance apparatus, with U.S. and UK government funding repeatedly acknowledged in the research.
The investigation titled “Shared Labs, Shared Harm” documents how two state-backed Chinese AI laboratories, the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI) and Zhejiang Lab, have co-authored roughly 3,000 papers with overseas researchers since 2020. With Western support and U.S. government funding, the labs have developed technologies in multi-object tracking, gait recognition, and infrared detection. These collaborations risk enabling human rights abuses and mass surveillance, and they help generate knowledge that can be incorporated into companies and institutions linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
U.S. Department of Defense and NIH Funding Reached Chinese Surveillance Partners
The Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI) has been directed since 2020 by Lu Jun, a senior scientist from the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC): the company that built the AI policing program the Integrated Joint Operations Platform used to facilitate mass detention in Xinjiang. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned CETC for the latter’s role in surveillance abuses.
SAIRI has published dozens of papers with major U.S. learning institutions, including MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and UC Berkeley. SAIRI has also acknowledged funding from:
- U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF): 13 instances
- National Institutes of Health (NIH): 3 instances
- Office of Naval Research (ONR): 1 instance
A 2022 MIT collaboration on optical phase-shifting — technology fundamental to military reconnaissance and biometric monitoring — was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an independent research and development agency within the U.S. Department of War (DoW).
British Taxpayers Funded Formal Partnership
UK Research and Innovation provided $13 million for the CAMERA 2.0 program at the University of Bath, which formally listed Zhejiang Lab as an international partner. Zhejiang Lab has received at least $1.25 billion from China’s provincial government and partners with six People’s Liberation Army institutes. The CAMERA 2.0 project focused on gait recognition — technology widely deployed in China to identify individuals when facial recognition is obstructed.
Surveillance Technologies Built Through Joint Research
Carnegie Mellon and U.S. Navy-funded tracking: Multi-object tracking research with Zhejiang Lab, supported by the NSF and ONR, developed systems that “follow multiple individuals across crowded environments” for “protest monitoring and smart-city policing.”
MIT, Johns Hopkins, and identity recognition: The AlphaTracker system applies “pose estimation, multi-object tracking, and identity recognition” capable of “continuous monitoring of individuals in crowded or obscured settings.”
Stanford and biomedical imaging: NIH-funded research with Stanford and SAIRI on medical imaging develops techniques the report notes “can be extended from medical diagnostics to large-scale human identification and monitoring.” SAIRI partners with China’s Ministry of Public Security and surveillance firms iFlytek and SenseTime — both sanctioned by the U.S. government for Xinjiang abuses.
AI Ethics Institutes Remained Silent
Of approximately 30 major AI ethics centers reviewed, only two — the Ada Lovelace Institute and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence — publicly condemned Chinese AI abuses during 2020-2025. Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, Cambridge;s Leverhulme Centre, and MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory issued no statements, even as their universities maintained active collaborations with Chinese institutions.
The Loophole
“Chinese laboratories are rarely listed as direct grant recipients, allowing them to bypass due-diligence checks while benefiting directly through co-authorship and knowledge transfer,” the report states. “Taxpayer resources generate knowledge that flows into institutions embedded in China’s apparatus of repression.” The report calls for mandatory human rights due diligence, full disclosure of international partnerships, and expanded ethics mandates for AI institutes.
About Strategy Risks
Strategy Risks is the leading global business intelligence firm specializing in China-related geopolitical and corporate risk. Strategy Risks delivers in-depth, actionable reports and insights to corporations, nonprofits, and investors navigating strategic challenges.
This research was funded through HRF’s AI for Individual Rights program, the world’s first initiative to expose artificial intelligence used by autocrats as a tool of repression and support open-source AI tools in the hands of dissidents.
