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.
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