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.
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
A Philippine boat convoy bearing supplies for Filipino fishers yesterday said that it was headed back to port, ditching plans to sail to a reef off the Southeast Asian country after one of their boats was “constantly shadowed” by a Chinese vessel. The Atin Ito (“This Is Ours”) coalition convoy on Wednesday set sail to distribute fuel and food to fishers and assert Philippine rights in the disputed South China Sea. “They will now proceed to the Subic fish port to mark the end of their successful mission,” the group said in a statement. A Philippine Coast Guard vessel escorting the convoy was
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged