Sam Dunning

Four founders of one of China’s most promising AI companies, Z.ai (智谱) aka Zhipu, worked on research in a joint project with Beijing-based China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI), a technology institute that the British government accused of having “very strong ties” to China’s main spy agency. The nearly four-year AI research project, which overlapped with the company’s start in 2019, was co-funded by CGTRI and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, according to a previously unreported 78-page report that the project’s leaders compiled to detail their findings. A CGTRI engineer and one of Z.ai’s founders were among the project’s leaders, and three other Z.ai founders contributed to the research. The report was published on a Chinese government website that provides research funding records. 🇬🇧 MI5 has accused CGTRI of primarily existing to fund academic research that directly improves China’s main spy agency’s “technical capability for espionage”. The institute has “very strong ties” to 🇨🇳 Ministry of State Security. The Z.ai founders’ work on research partially funded by a Chinese intelligence front highlights the risks cited by some US officials regarding China’s growing prowess in AI — and could add to further scrutiny of Z.ai in particular. The US restricted Z.ai’s access to American technology in 2025 based on allegations that the company aided the military with AI research. More recently, US officials accused the company of systemically extracting proprietary knowledge from American rivals. In-Q-Tel, an independent non-profit investment firm set up by the CIA in 1999, has made AI-related investments as part of its focus on start-upsused by the military and intelligence agencies.  The project involving CGTRI and the Z.ai founders ran from Jan 2018 through Dec 2021 and had a total approved project budget of 2.94 million yuan. It sought to develop AI tools to analyse social media posts, spot key events and map peoples’ connections. A key goal of the project was developing a knowledge base of “China-related key persons”. The project involved research with both military and civilian uses that seeks to revolutionize how people use AI to identify and track specific individuals. 🇨🇳 Ministry of State Security “had an obvious interest in funding this research and reaping the targeting benefits”. Z.ai was spun out of research done at 🇨🇳 Tsinghua University. The company has received backing from local governments in China, as well as tech giants including Alibaba and Tencent. Four of them are listed as participating in the AI research project, which was jointly conducted by CGTRI, Tsinghua University and Southeast University, according to the researchers’ report. Z.ai co-founder Li Juanzi, a professor in the computer science and technology department at Tsinghua University in Beijing, led the research project alongside CGTRI’s Cao Weibing and another professor from China’s Southeast University. It describes the three as being “jointly responsible for the design of the overall technical plan, coordination of tasks among the three participating institutions, and the overall research progress of the project”. That report lists three other founders of Z.ai — Tang Jie, Xu Bin and CEO Zhang Peng — as co-authors of papers, co-inventors on patents, or holders of software copyrights in a directory of all the project’s research achievements. The report explicitly states that non-participants cannot be included. Only one person identified in Z.ai’s interim report as a company founder and “key person” was not named in the project’s documentation, chairman Liu Debing. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…