The Five Eyes countries’ intelligence chiefs on Tuesday came together to accuse China of intellectual property theft and using artificial intelligence (AI) for hacking and spying against the nations, in a rare joint statement by the allies.
The officials from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US — known as the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network — made the comments following meetings with private companies in Silicon Valley.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said the “unprecedented” joint call was meant to confront the “unprecedented threat” China poses to innovation across the world.
Photo: Reuters
From quantum technology and robotics to biotechnology and AI, China is stealing secrets in various sectors, the officials said.
“China has long targeted businesses with a web of techniques all at once: cyberintrusions, human intelligence operations, seemingly innocuous corporate investments and transactions,” Wray said. “Every strand of that web had become more brazen, and more dangerous.”
Chinese embassy in Washington spokesman Liu Pengyu (劉鵬宇) said that Beijing is committed to intellectual property protection.
“We firmly oppose the groundless allegations and smears towards China and hope the relevant parties can view China’s development objectively and fairly,” Liu said in a statement.
The US has long accused China of intellectual property theft and the issue has been a key sore point in US-China relations, but this is the first time the Five Eyes members have joined publicly to call China out on it.
“The Chinese government is engaged in the most sustained scaled and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess said.
While China’s intention to innovate for its own national interest was “fine and entirely appropriate ... the behavior we’re talking about here goes well beyond traditional espionage,” Burgess said.
Last month, his department uncovered a Chinese plot to infiltrate a prestigious Australian research institution that involved planting an academic there to steal secrets, he said.
“This sort of thing is happening every day in Australia, as it is in the countries here,” Burgess said.
Wray said China had “a bigger hacking program than that of every other major nation combined,” which together with Beijing’s physical spies and stealing of trade secrets from private businesses and research institutions, gave the country enormous power.
“Part of what makes it so challenging is all of those tools deployed in tandem, at a scale the likes of which we’ve never seen,” Wray said.
The officials called for private industry and academia to help in countering those threats, chief among which they said were AI tools.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
RSS