Elon Musk has called artificial intelligence (AI) an “existential threat” to humanity’s survival, so you’d think the United States would go to great lengths to make sure it’s at the forefront of the artificial intelligence research or, at the very least, make sure this kind of dangerous technology doesn’t fall into the hands of our nation’s enemies.
But the Pentagon seems to see things differently.
According to a bomb report a Newsweekthe US government paid at least $30 million in federal grants “for research led by a scientist who is now at the forefront of China’s race to develop the most advanced artificial intelligence, which he compared to the bomb atomic because of its military importance.”
At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Song-Chun Zhu led a “pioneering AI center” that was receiving funding from the Pentagon, Newsweek reports.
This funding continued, the company reports, “even as he established a parallel institute near Wuhan, took a position at a university in Beijing whose main purpose is to support military research Chinese and joined a Chinese Communist Party ‘talent scheme’ whose members are charged with transferring knowledge and technology to China.”
According to Newsweek, the revelations gleaned from their investigation “underscore how the United States, with its open academic environment, has not only been a source for China of advanced technology with military applications, but has also collaborated and financed actively with scientists from its main rival.”
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In response to the outlet’s questions about Zhu’s funding, the Defense Department defended the international collaboration, arguing that it gives the United States an opportunity to recruit the best minds on the planet, including those from China.
A federal agency that awarded Zhu millions of dollars in grants, the National Science Foundation (NSF), in 2022 began using new analytical tools to better identify potential conflicts of interest.
“Song-Chun Zhu’s foreign affiliations and collaborations were identified and communicated to the intelligence community and law enforcement,” the head of Security Strategy and Policy at the National Security Agency told Newsweek. NSF, Rebecca Keiser. “NSF realized these national security and research security risks near the end of this scientist’s funding range.”
Zhu, as far as Newsweek knows, has not been charged with breaking any US laws. However, neither Zhu, Zhu’s research center nor the Chinese embassy in Washington DC responded to the media’s requests for comment.
During its investigation, Newsweek examined “federal grant databases, scientific papers, reports from Chinese and American universities and companies, and Chinese local government announcements.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as “DARPA,” the Navy and the Army were among Zhu’s top donors.
Newsweek reports:
Most of the federal grants awarded to Zhu, a professor of statistics and computer science, were in the decade before 2020, the year he returned to China after 18 years at the Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning and Autonomy of UCLA.
But two grants included in 2021: one for $699,938 to develop “high-level robot autonomy” that was “important to DoD tasks such as autonomous robots, search and rescue missions,” according to the website of subsidies from the Department of Defense.
Another, for $520,811, aimed to build “cognitive robot platforms” for “intelligence and surveillance systems using ground and airborne sensors.” Zhu was named principal investigator on both grants awarded by the Office of Naval Research.
The Center for Research Security and Integrity is a Washington-based nonprofit organization dedicated to mitigating research risk from US adversaries.
Its director, Jeffrey Stoff, explained that China routinely takes advantage of US funding.
“China has built a vast system to extract technology and knowledge from US government-funded research,” Stoff told Newsweek.
“Exacerbating this problem,” he continued, is a double-dipping, where recipients of federal research dollars like Zhu also receive Chinese government funding for the same research and divert efforts to China’s benefit.
Overtaking the US and its allies in technology and capabilities has long been a stated goal of China’s leaders for the People’s Liberation Army.
“AI is a critical part of this,” according to Newsweek, “with China aiming to surpass the United States in multiple spheres of power, including economic and geopolitical by mid-century, while the Chinese leader Xi Jinping is pursuing what he calls “changes not seen in a century”—and strengthening ties with other US rivals such as Russia and Iran.
Former President Donald Trump in 2020 issued a ban on Chinese graduate students with ties to the military, and on Oct. 30, President Joe Biden signed an executive order “to ensure that the U.S. lead the way” in AI.
“Highlighting Western concerns,” Newsweek reports, “the heads of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing network from the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand made an unprecedented joint appearance in mid- October to warn that China’s massive extraction of technology was putting the US and the West at a military, economic and security disadvantage, threatening their leadership in science and innovation.
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Former US Secretary of State and current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Condoleezza Rice, asked at the event: “What if Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had won the nuclear race instead of the United States?”
“We could have lived in a very different world,” he said.
Since returning to China in 2020, Zhu, in a proposal presented to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a top political body of which he is a member, Zhu said that the influence of AI “is equivalent to the ‘ atomic bomb’ in the field of information technology”. .”
“If our country can take the lead in realizing truly universal intelligence,” he said, “it will become the ‘winner’ of the international technological competition.”
“He is an expert in AI disciplines that are considered critically important to the United States, which is why he received so much funding from the Department of Defense and other federal research,” Stoff said of Zhu. “However, I question what the US government has gained from its extensive investment in Zhu since he established a research institute and companies in China whose key personnel were trained by him as Ph.D. students and postdocs”.
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