A new study warns that elite U.S. universities — including MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Princeton — have collaborated for years with Chinese AI institutes tied to Beijing’s surveillance system used in the repression of Uyghurs.
The report, published by Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation, shows that two major China-backed labs — Zhejiang Lab and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI) — co-authored about 3,000 research papers with Western scholars since 2020. Both labs are connected to CETC, the Chinese defense conglomerate behind mass surveillance platforms targeted Uyghurs.
According to the study, Western-funded joint research helped advance technologies such as facial and gait recognition that Chinese authorities use in the campaign that both the Trump and Biden administrations have recognized as a genocide.
The authors say the problem is not espionage, but the normalization of U.S. universities treating Chinese security-linked labs as ordinary partners, despite Chinese laws requiring all institutions to support CCP surveillance and intelligence operations.
Human Rights Foundation strategist Alex Gladstein said Western AI ethics institutions have largely ignored how China weaponizes AI to repress its own citizens, often due to financial ties and incentives.
The report also notes that major Western universities continued cooperation while remaining mostly silent on China’s abuses from 2020–2025.
China’s surveillance state in Uyghur homeland (officially Xinjiang) — involving mass detention, forced labor and pervasive tracking of Uyghurs — is described as the world’s most advanced digital police system.
The study urges mandatory human-rights reviews for international research partnerships and restrictions on collaboration with Chinese labs linked to surveillance and defense.
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