The U.S. Intelligence Community has awarded more than a dozen sensitive defense grants to researchers affiliated with institutions connected to the Chinese government and its military, according to a report exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Since 2017, at least 14 U.S. defense research projects supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — which is tasked by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) with investing in “high-risk, high-payoff research programs” — have included investigators simultaneously affiliated with Chinese national laboratories, state surveillance entities, military units and nuclear weapons development institutions, according to the report published by Parallax Advanced Research, a nonprofit funded by U.S. federal, state and municipal governments. Participants in at least two of the IARPA projects cited in the report conducted similar research during the same period with Chinese government-tied institutions, raising serious concerns about U.S. defense technology transfer to a hostile foreign power.
“These studies reveal a deliberate effort by China’s intelligence and public security apparatus, alongside military-affiliated entities, to extract lessons, methodologies, and technical knowledge from IARPA-funded programs,” the report warns. “This includes attempts to reverse-engineer research outputs, replicate experimental designs, and adapt [U.S. Intelligence Community] technologies for use in China’s mass surveillance apparatus and strategic military capabilities.”
Researchers with ties to adversarial nations, like China, should be prohibited from collaborating on U.S. intelligence and defense research, the report’s co-author, L.J. Eads, director of research intelligence at Parallax, told the DCNF.
“What I found most concerning was the sheer number of IARPA funded projects that IARPA itself describes as having clear Intelligence Community value that have involved — and in some cases continue to involve — Chinese institutions and companies, including personnel directly tied to the [People’s Liberation Army],” said Eads.
ODNI and IARPA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘Grave National Security Threats’
In one 2024 case study highlighted in the report, the lead investigator for IARPA’s BRIAR Program was allegedly found to have “a long history” of simultaneous collaboration with Chinese institutions connected to China’s military as well as U.S. government-sanctioned researchers.
IARPA’s ongoing BRIAR Program aims to produce detection and tracking software for individuals by “extracting biometric signatures from the whole-body (e.g., gait and/or body shape) and face,” according to IARPA, and supports U.S. counterterrorism, military force protection, and border security.
The lead investigator for the $11 million BRIAR Program is a Michigan State University faculty member, who has simultaneously collaborated on Chinese government-funded projects with a number of institutions including “Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), in China, on similar gait research,” according to the report.
SUSTech has “documented partnerships across China’s defense research ecosystem,” the report states, citing a threat assessment from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is a think tank partially funded by that nation’s Department of Defense.
Additionally, the lead investigator for IARPA’s BRIAR Program has also allegedly collaborated on research with the deputy director of China’s liaison office in Hong Kong, according to the report. The U.S. Treasury Department added that deputy director to its “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons” list, which flags entities “controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, targeted countries,” resulting in their assets being blocked, according to the U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC).
China’s research sectors have “deep entanglements” with U.S. intelligence defense programs, and “present grave national security threats,” former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Cella told the DCNF after reviewing Parallax’s findings.
“[I]t is critical to the U.S. and its Free World allies to do a deep-dive self-assessment and begin the process of de-risking, and in some sectors, de-coupling,” said Cella, who now serves as director of the Michigan-China Economic and Security Review Group.
A Michigan State University spokesperson declined to answer questions related to the report’s findings and referred the DCNF to the school’s policy on academic conflicts of interest and disclosure requirements.
‘Intelligence Applications’
In another case study highlighted in Parallax’s report, datasets from IARPA’s BABEL Program were used by PLA researchers, U.S. and Chinese academics to conduct experiments for a 2018 publication concerning speech recognition technologies.
Operating under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, the PLA “focuses squarely on overcoming the United States through a whole-of-nation mobilization effort,” and aims to achieve “‘strategic counterbalance’ against the United States in the nuclear and other strategic domains” by 2027, according to the Department of Defense.
The BABEL Program aims to support the U.S. intelligence community by developing technologies capable of generating a “speech transcription system for any new language within one week,” according to IARPA.
Despite its value to the U.S. intelligence community, the 2018 publication included a researcher from PLA Unit 62315, who “concurrently filed a related patent in China “with other members of the same unit,” Parallax’s report found.
“Although extensive searches of Chinese-language sources did not yield public information on the internal mission or structure of PLA Unit 62315, its role using IARPA-provided datasets, combined with the concurrent filing of a related patent by the same unit, demonstrates a clear PLA interest in advancing speech recognition and acoustic modeling capabilities,” the report states.
‘Security Problem’
The report also flags a 2023 IARPA-funded publication that included a researcher from the China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP).
Subordinate to China’s Central Military Commission, CAEP is “the technology complex responsible for the research, development and testing of China’s nuclear weapons” and is on the Entity List, according to the U.S. Federal Register.
The Entity List identifies persons likely involved in “activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States,” and, consequently, prohibits certain items, like semiconductors, from being exported to those entities, according to the federal government.
The 2023 publication involving the CAEP researcher was connected to IARPA’s LogiQ Program, which “aims to advance quantum computing” in order to solve problems “of interest to the Intelligence Community and the U.S. Government as a whole,” according to IARPA.
CAEP’s involvement in IARPA’s LogiQ program “means sensitive U.S. quantum error correction innovations may have been exposed to [China’s] nuclear and quantum military ecosystem,” the report warns.
“This report only scratches the surface of a much larger and more serious research security problem,” Eads told the DCNF.
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