Report: Elite U.S. Universities Partnered With Chinese AI Labs Tied To Xinjiang Surveillance

A new joint report from Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation warns that several leading U.S. universities — including MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Princeton — have collaborated with Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories that are closely linked to Beijing’s surveillance and security apparatus. The study says these partnerships have, in some cases, produced thousands of co-authored papers and aided development of technologies used in mass surveillance.

Key Findings

The report highlights two state-backed Chinese labs — Zhejiang Lab and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI) — which it says have co-authored roughly 3,000 papers with Western researchers since 2020. Both labs are reported to have ties to CETC, a Chinese defense conglomerate implicated in building the Xinjiang surveillance infrastructure used to monitor Uyghur communities. U.S. administrations under Presidents Biden and Trump have described China’s campaign against Uyghurs as a "genocide."

According to the authors, collaborations supported by Western institutions and some U.S. government funding helped advance capabilities such as multi-object tracking, gait recognition and infrared detection. Strategy Risks and HRF argue these advances can be — and in some cases have been — incorporated into tools for mass surveillance and repression.

"With Western support and U.S. government funding, the labs have developed technologies in multi-object tracking, gait recognition, and infrared detection," the report states, adding that such collaborations "facilitated human rights abuses, mass surveillance, and the transfer of sensitive U.S. technology to Chinese companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party."

Normalization and Legal Context

The authors emphasize their central concern is the "shocking normalization" of treating Chinese security-linked labs as ordinary research partners. They note that China’s national security, intelligence, cybersecurity and data-security laws require organizations — including civilian research institutes — to assist state surveillance and intelligence operations. As a result, Western research may be directly absorbed into systems of repression.

The report also criticizes several leading Western AI ethics institutes and academic departments — including those at Oxford, Cambridge, MIT and Berkeley — for largely remaining silent about China’s use of AI for repression between 2020 and 2025, even while their universities maintained collaborations. The authors say only two organizations publicly condemned Beijing’s practices during that period.

Human Rights Context

Over the past decade, China has built extensive surveillance infrastructure in Xinjiang. Independent researchers and human rights organizations estimate that more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities have been subjected to mass detention, forced labor, coercive "re‑education" and pervasive biometric surveillance that tracks faces, voices, movements and other personal data. The report argues that without new guardrails, Western research and public funding will continue to flow into systems of repression.

Recommendations

To reduce risk, the authors call for: mandatory human-rights due diligence for international research partnerships; greater transparency on foreign co-authorships and funding; and limitations on collaborations with Chinese state-linked labs involved in surveillance and defense. The report’s release aims to prompt new investigative research and policy responses.

Fox News Digital and other outlets reported on the study; the article notes that Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation released the findings on Monday. Fox News Digital reached out to MIT, Harvard and Princeton for comment.