Chairman Issa, Ranking Member Johnson, distinguished members of the subcommittee and staff, I am grateful for the opportunity to join today’s hearing on two topics that have fascinated—and terrified—me over the past decades, namely, China’s use of foreign technology to fuel its science and technology enterprise, and China’s drive to be the world’s leader in artificial intelligence.¹.

I am a founding member of Georgetown University’s Center for Security for Emerging Technology (CSET), where I work with a small team to identify threats posed by Chinese AI. Prior to that, I was an SIS officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where I managed open source exploitation of Chinese S&T materials and built a program to track China’s transfer of U.S. technologies. These efforts culminated in two books on Chinese Industrial Espionage² and China’s Quest for Foreign Technology,³ which became de facto handbooks, and the recent volume Chinese Power and Artificial Intelligence,⁴ a comprehensive look at China AI. 

China’s technology transfer programs date from 1956⁵ and cover every imaginable practice and venue. The link with AI, besides China’s use of its collection apparatus to tap global AI know-how, is the likelihood that China will soon—if it has not already—use AI for cyber exploits to further its transfer agenda, an unholy marriage in which advances in the one promote progress in the other, multiplying existing threats to U.S. and allied security. 

My testimony covers this topic in three parts: 

1. China’s technology transfer practices. It’s impossible to condense 700 pages of book narrative, terabytes of (unclassified) data, a mile-long list of known cases, and two decades of horror stories into this brief space. My testimony accordingly is limited to an overview of how the Chinese transfer system operates, with emphasis on “extralegal” or gray area maneuvers, at which China excels and which are devilishly hard to track. 
2. Chinese artificial intelligence. My team does not share the perception that China’s alleged lag in “generative” AI large language models (LLMs) absolves us from concern, because (a) China need not be at the cusp to adapt these models wherever it wishes; (b) it can literally “beg, borrow and steal” what it needs; and (c) China is aggressively pursuing alternate paths to advanced AI aimed at AGI and a “first mover advantage.”. 
3. China’s use of tech transfer to further its AI program. While respecting China’s home-grown efforts to build advanced AI—which we have come to greatly admire—China has not shied from acquiring AI technology from abroad. My team has documented China’s use of each of its acquisition venues to advance its AI program. Legal venues of support, provided by U.S. multinationals, are on a scale that shocks even this jaundiced observer. 

1. PRC State Council, “New Generation AI Development Plan” (国务院关于印发《新一代人工智能发展规划》的通知), PRC State Council, 2017.
2. William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon, and Anna Puglisi, Chinese Industrial Espionage. (New York and London: Routledge, 2013).
3. William C. Hannas and Didi Kirsten Tatlow, eds. Beyond Espionage: China’s Quest for Foreign Technology (New York and London: Routledge, 2021).
4. William C. Hannas and Huey-Meei Chang, eds., Chinese Power and Artificial Intelligence (New York and London: Routledge, 2023).
5. “1956-1967年科学技术发展远景规划纲要 (Outline of the Long-term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology from 1956 to 1967), State Council,” August 1956. Ratified in December 1956.