MIT accepted funding from China for AI research and potentially aided in Uyghur surveillance.
Prestigious university partnered with twice-sanctioned SenseTime to advance facial recognition technology
Uyghur men gather to pray in the far western Xinjiang province / Getty Images
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology took funding from a twice-sanctioned Chinese company to advance aspects of facial recognition technology that the Chinese have reportedly used to track and imprison Uyghurs, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
China’s largest facial recognition startup, SenseTime—founded by an MIT graduate, Xiao’ou Tang, who now resides in mainland China—donated an undisclosed amount of money to MIT in 2018, the university said in a press release at the time.
A year later, in 2019, the New York Times reported that SenseTime’s technology is part of a “vast, secret system” the Chinese use to “track and control Uyghurs.” The Trump administration went on to blacklist SenseTime in the fall of 2019, after MIT had accepted the money, citing the company’s role in the “repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance” of the country’s Muslim minority in Xinjiang.
MIT said at the time that it would review its relationship with SenseTime but did not return the cash.
MIT used SenseTime’s money to fund research projects that resulted in 20 papers that focused on or mentioned “neural networks,” the Free Beacon found. Neural networks—a term of art for the artificial intelligence method that teaches computers to process data like the human brain—are used in facial recognition technology, according to industry experts. Fourteen of the papers, meanwhile, covered image data or image recognition algorithms. And one of the SenseTime-funded research papers even featured authors associated with Zhejiang University, which works on classified projects for China’s military.
While it’s unclear exactly how SenseTime may have used the research produced by MIT, the Chinese company sent a flurry of patent applications during the same time period its American partner published research. Between 2019 and 2022, MIT released dozens of SenseTime-funded research papers on neural networks and image recognition. In that time, SenseTime filed 47 patent applications with the World International Patent Organization for facial and image recognition technology.
SenseTime’s funding of MIT research reflects China’s longstanding effort to influence American higher education.
Over the past decade, China has donated more to U.S. universities than any other foreign nation, according to a House Foreign Affairs Committee report. In some cases, those contributions come from individuals and groups that work with the communist nation’s military. A Chinese tech billionaire whose company helped the People’s Liberation Army develop “force modernization plans,” for example, has given MIT $5 million and sits on advisory boards for Yale and Cornell, the Free Beacon reported last year.
MIT and SenseTime announced an “Alliance on Artificial Intelligence” in 2018, a partnership that came with the undisclosed financial gift from SenseTime to the school.
MIT told the Free Beacon it used the money for research projects “selected by MIT faculty,” adding that ”MIT does not have any sponsored research collaborations or activities with SenseTime.”
Even in the face of more restrictive Biden administration sanctions that block U.S. investment in SenseTime, MIT has held onto the cash. A spokesman for the school told the Free Beacon that the university ”put on hold additional uses of the funding not already allocated, including pausing any new calls for research proposals that might be funded by the gift and not moving forward with any fellowships.”
MIT did not answer additional questions.
SenseTime has decried the Biden administration’s sanctions, saying in 2021 that the accusations against it are “unfounded and reflect a fundamental misperception of our company.”
“We regret to have been caught in the middle of geopolitical tension,” the company’s statement read.
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