The United States government gave at least $30 million in grants to Song-Chun Zhu, a Chinese scientist working to develop his country's global supremacy in artificial intelligence.
Newsweek looked into the grants and found that the Pentagon continued distributing the money even as Zhu set up two AI institutes in China and strengthened his ties to the ruling Communist Party.
Rebecca Keiser of the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that gave millions to Zhu, said the agency stopped the funding in 2022 after employing new tools to counter conflicts of interest.
"The foreign collaborations and affiliations of Song-Chun Zhu were identified and reported to the intelligence community and law enforcement," said Keiser, the NSF's head of research security strategy and policy.
"The NSF became aware of these national security and research security risks near the end range of this scientist's funding," she added.
The Department of Defense, meanwhile, defended its initial funding of Zhu, arguing that there were advantages to international collaboration with China.
Among those in the DOD that funded Zhu were the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Navy, and the Army.
Zhu led the University of California, Los Angeles' Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning and Autonomy from 2002 until 2020, where he piled up the grants.
They included $699,938 from the Office of Naval Research to develop "high-level robot autonomy" and another $520,811 for "cognitive robot platforms," documents showed.
After leaving the center, Zhu founded the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, where he openly acknowledged the uses of AI for cyberwarfare and disinformation.
"Its influence is equivalent to the 'atomic bomb' in the information technology field," Zhu explained at the time. "If our country can take the lead in realizing a truly universal intelligence, it will become the 'winner' of the international technological competition."
Zhu is also chief scientist at the Wuhan Institute for Artificial Intelligence, founded last December.
The Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a Washington, D.C. think tank, noted that Zhu was not the only high-profile, U.S.-trained AI scientist to return to China in recent years.
Former Microsoft Executive Vice President Harry Shum and two Ivy League professors, Pu Muming and Yao Chi-chih, have also repatriated.
Luca Cacciatore ✉
Luca Cacciatore, a Newsmax general assignment writer, is based in Arlington, Virginia, reporting on news and politics.
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