China’s ambitious spy agency rising to challenge CIA

Finding new ways to use AI in surveillance

The Chinese spies wanted more. In meetings during the pandemic with Chinese technology contractors, they complained that surveillance cameras tracking foreign diplomats, military officers, and intelligence operatives fell short of their needs.

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, is now going toe-totoe 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 US 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 US officials and a review of internal Chinese corporate documents and public MSS documents.

Because of China’s economic boom and industrial policies, the MSS is able to use emerging technologies such as AI to challenge US 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 research institute.

The MSS has intensified its intelligence collection on US 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 US 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 the agency was making investments and reorganizing to meet the challenge of collecting on Chinese advances.