Western AI researchers partnered with Chinese surveillance firms

Leading western artificial intelligence researchers have partnered with Chinese organisations tied to Beijing’s surveillance state, raising fears that a severe lack of oversight is leaving academics complicit in China’s human rights abuses.

At least nine academic papers on topics such as facial recognition and video surveillance have been co-written by academics at several prestigious US institutions, alongside researchers at Chinese companies that sell surveillance technology to the Chinese state or at institutions with military ties, such as China’s National University of Defense Technology, or NUDT.

Four of the US authors of these papers list Google as an affiliation, three of whom said that the research was conducted either fully outside of Google or had been partly done before they joined Google.

Read the full article and more in the Financial Times.