Marco Rubio
Last November, investigative reporters uncovered that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) had provided $30 million in artificial intelligence research grants to a Chinese scientist at the Beijing Institute of Technology, a university tasked with developing next-generation weapons for the People’s Liberation Army. The news came as a shock to American policymakers and ordinary citizens alike. It was unthinkable that the U.S. government would fund our chief adversary’s defense industrial base.
I would like to say the story ends there. The reality, however, is that this scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. A new unclassified analysis provided to my office by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) reveals that U.S. taxpayers have been unwittingly funding thousands of Chinese experiments with direct applications to the Chinese military. Their findings note more than 5,000 instances of research collaboration between the DoD’s funding agencies and Chinese entities between 2019 and 2024.
These are not just any entities but groups closely linked to Beijing’s ambitions to steal American technology and defeat the U.S. military in a potential conflict. NCIS specifically records eighty-one collaborations with China’s nuclear weapon research and development complex, hundreds of collaborations with the “Seven Sons of National Defense” and the “Seven Sons of Ordnance Industry”—China’s premier defense industry-affiliated universities—and seventeen collaborations with China’s National University of Defense Technology—the People’s Liberation Army’s premier scientific research institute. NCIS also reports dozens of collaborations connected to Beijing’s “acknowledge talent” program, an initiative that recruits top minds to appropriate information and expertise for China’s economic and military development.
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