The spies asked for an artificial intelligence program that would create instant dossiers on every person of interest in the area and analyze their behavior patterns. They proposed feeding the AI program information from databases and scores of cameras that would include car license plates, cellphone data, contacts and more.
The AI-generated profiles would allow the Chinese spies to select targets and pinpoint their networks and vulnerabilities, according to internal meeting memos obtained by The New York Times.
The spies’ interest in the technology, disclosed here for the first time, reveals some of the vast ambitions of the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency. In recent years, it has built itself up through wider recruitment, including of American citizens. The agency has also sharpened itself through better training, a bigger budget and the use of advanced technologies to try to fulfill the goal of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, for the nation to rival the United States as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.
The Chinese agency, known as the MSS, once rife with agents whose main source of information was gossip at embassy dinner parties, is now going toe-to-toe with the CIA in collection and subterfuge around the world.
Today, Chinese agents in Beijing have what they asked for: an AI system that tracks American spies and others, said U.S. officials and a person with knowledge of the transaction, who shared the information on the condition that the Times not disclose the names of the contracting firms involved. At the same time, as spending on China at the CIA has doubled since the start of the Biden administration, the United States has sharply stepped up its spying on Chinese companies and their technological advances. This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, and a review of internal Chinese corporate documents and public MSS documents. Competition between the U.S. and Chinese spy agencies harks back to the KGB-versus-CIA rivalry of the Cold War. In that era, the Soviets built an agency that could pilfer America’s most closely held secrets and run covert operations while also producing formidable political leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But there is a notable difference. Because of China’s economic boom and industrial policies, the MSS is able to use emerging technologies such as AI to challenge U.S. spymasters in a way the Soviets could not. And those technologies are top prizes in espionage efforts by China and the United States.
“For China in particular, exploiting the existing technology or trade secrets of others has become a popular shortcut encouraged by the government,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based research institute. “The urgency and intensity of technological espionage have increased significantly.”
The MSS has intensified its intelligence collection on U.S. companies developing technology with both military and civilian uses, while the CIA, in a change from even a few years ago, is pouring resources into collecting data on Chinese companies developing AI, quantum computing and other such tools.
Though the U.S. intelligence community has long collected economic intelligence, gathering detailed information on commercial technological advances outside defense companies was once the kind of espionage the United States avoided.
But information about China’s development of emerging technologies is now considered as important as divining its conventional military might or the machinations of its leaders.
CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said that under President Joe Biden, the agency was making investments and reorganizing to meet the challenge of collecting on Chinese advances. The agency has started both a China mission center and a technology intelligence center.
“We’ve been counting tanks and understanding the capability of missiles for longer than we have been as sharply focused on the capability of semiconductors or AI algorithms or biotech equipment,” Cohen said in an interview.
But some policymakers say privately that the effort is still falling short, and that Chinese companies and the military are surprising the U.S. government with their advances.
The central government in Beijing established the Ministry of State Security in 1983 during a reshuffling of security units. For decades, the agency struggled to win favor with party leaders. Its Chinese rival, the intelligence services of the People’s Liberation Army, had greater resources and better tradecraft, especially in cyberespionage.
The MSS gradually improved its tactics, got bigger budgets and even built business expertise. Some MSS officers who would be working undercover as businesspeople were sent to private sector offices for training, said Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst and co-author of a book on Chinese espionage.
Chinese agents also expanded their foreign recruitment targets, including among U.S. citizens.
U.S. intelligence agencies were alarmed after discovering that the Shanghai MSS had recruited an American student in China, Glenn Duffie Shriver, and got him to apply to the CIA and State Department. Shriver was sentenced in 2011 to four years in prison.
“It was a big sign of improved tradecraft from MSS, for the first time targeting non-Chinese Americans and attempting penetration of the U.S. intelligence community,” said John Culver, a former U.S. intelligence analyst.
The case has had far-reaching consequences. It made U.S. counterintelligence officers more suspicious of applicants for U.S. government jobs who had studied in China or had contacts there, and it turned their attention to MSS provincial bureaus.
The bureaus are their own fiefs, based outside the agency’s national headquarters, which is in the secretive Xiyuan compound of northwest Beijing. Under Xi, they have become more aggressive in operations overseas, with some specializing in recruiting and running informants in the United States.
The bureau in Jiangsu province, next to Shanghai, is another one focused on getting U.S. secrets, and particularly defense technologies, U.S. officials said.
Its officers recruited Ji Chaoqun shortly before he went to the United States in 2013 to study engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, according to the Justice Department and court documents. His MSS handler, Xu Yanjun, got him to provide the names of at least nine people in the United States for the Chinese spy agency to try to recruit to get aerospace and satellite technologies.
Ji eventually joined the U.S. Army Reserves, where he aimed to get a security clearance so he could eventually apply to work in the CIA, FBI or NASA. He was arrested in Chicago in 2018 and sentenced this year to eight years in prison. Xu, his handler, was arrested in Brussels in 2018, in a related operation run by the FBI, becoming the first MSS agent to be extradited to the United States.
The MSS often directly hires from universities. In recent years, it has sought technology experts, including hackers, according to two people with knowledge of the recruiting efforts.
Beijing’s most acute worry is that the United States and its allies could choke China off from technological know-how vital for economic and military growth.
The MSS has been elevating experts on the United States. Early this year, one such analyst, Yuan Peng, president of the main research institute, appeared under a new name, Yuan Yikun, as a vice minister of the ministry itself. Earlier in his career, Yuan often mixed with U.S. scholars, some of whom saw him as a coolheaded observer of Washington.
While president of the research institute, Yuan became a champion of Xi’s sweeping concept of “overall national security,” which casts the United States as the main threat to China’s ascent.
“Biden said ‘America is back,’ but the world is not the same as it was, and if it can’t keep up with massive global changes, then this changing world will inevitably slip from U.S. control,” Yuan wrote in an international strategy assessment published in early 2022. “In judging current American grand strategy a few decades from now, its biggest mistake may be seen as choosing China as an enemy.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.