This piece originally appeared in the National Interest.
In January, when a little-known Chinese AI startup called DeepSeek stunned the tech industry by developing a cutting-edge large language model, one revelation stood out: several of its top engineers had honed their skills at Microsoft’s artificial intelligence lab in China. This was no coincidence and exemplifies a larger trend: Microsoft’s longstanding presence and partnerships in China helped the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advance its techno-authoritarian ambitions.
In pursuit of market access and talent, Microsoft spent decades building research centers and forging collaborations in China. In the process, they trained a generation of Chinese AI experts, transferred knowledge and tools that bolstered China’s military and surveillance state, and complied with the CCP’s censorship demands. As the race for AI supremacy intensifies, it’s time to confront how one of America’s largest tech giants empowered an authoritarian rival’s agenda.
Microsoft first opened its research lab in Beijing in 1998 as part of its larger subsidiary, Microsoft Research Asia. The goal of this lab was to use Chinese researchers to produce groundbreaking research on areas such as computer vision and speech recognition. In the process, Microsoft Research Asia also ended up training thousands of Chinese scientists and engineers, becoming something of a finishing school for China’s tech elite. The founders and top executives of major Chinese tech firms have passed through Microsoft’s labs, including Zhang Yiming of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, Tang Xiao’ou of AI giant SenseTime, and leading technologists from Alibaba and Baidu.
