A U.S. congressional committee has requested the Commerce Department to look into whether or not a large know-how firm managed by the ruling household of the United Arab Emirates needs to be put underneath commerce restrictions due to its ties to China.
The firm, G42, focuses on synthetic intelligence and different rising applied sciences, and is overseen by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the nationwide safety adviser of the Emirates and a youthful brother of the nation’s ruler.
It has signed latest agreements with outstanding American know-how corporations, together with Microsoft, Dell and OpenAI. A Silicon Valley chip agency, Cerebras, is constructing a supercomputer for G42 to create and energy A.I. merchandise.
But in a letter despatched to the Commerce Department on Wednesday, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party stated the corporate works extensively with China’s “military, intelligence services and state-owned entities,” based on a replica obtained by The New York Times. The letter was signed by the chairman of the committee, Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin.
Officials within the Biden administration have privately expressed related issues concerning the firm, which they worry might be a conduit by which superior American know-how is siphoned to Chinese corporations or the federal government, The New York Times reported in November.
Although the Emirates is a U.S. accomplice and one of many largest consumers of American weapons, it has more and more sought army and financial cooperation with China. That has stoked worries amongst U.S. officers, who usually go to the small Persian Gulf nation to debate safety points. On Monday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met in Abu Dhabi with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the chief of the Emirates, whereas on a regional tour centered on the Israel-Gaza battle, and the 2 “underscored the importance of the strategic partnership,” the State Department stated.
The congressional committee stated it had reviewed paperwork exhibiting that the chief government of G42, Peng Xiao, “operates and is affiliated with an expansive network of companies that materially support” the Chinese army’s technological development in addition to human rights abuses.
The committee requested the Commerce Department to think about imposing export controls on G42 and 13 corporations, most of them primarily based in China, which are owned by it or linked to it.
The controls would prohibit U.S. companies from promoting merchandise to the Emirati and Chinese corporations and not using a department-issued license. The committee stated it was giving the Commerce Department till Feb. 2 to behave or clarify to lawmakers why it was not doing so.
Five of the businesses in China, the committee stated, are affiliated with the Emirati agency DarkMatter, which has developed spyware and adware and surveillance instruments. The letter didn’t say precisely how the Chinese associates, additionally referred to as DarkMatter, have been tied to the Emirati agency.
The C.I.A. has a labeled profile of Mr. Xiao. He was born in China and attended school and graduate college within the United States earlier than working at a Virginia know-how firm, MicroStrategy, which he left in 2014, based on public paperwork and reviews. At some level, he gained U.S. citizenship however renounced it in favor of Emirati citizenship. A G42 consultant confirmed his Chinese identify is 肖鹏, which seems on the web site of the Chinese Embassy within the Emirates.
A spokesperson for the committee declined to reveal the paperwork it had reviewed.
In an announcement, a Commerce Department spokesperson stated “we have received the letter and will respond through the appropriate channels.”
G42 representatives didn’t reply emails requesting remark.
American intelligence officers had raised issues concerning the firm’s relationship with China in a collection of labeled assessments, based on the Times investigation. The report additionally stated prime Biden administration officers had pressed their Emirati counterparts to sever the corporate’s ties to China.
Those ties embrace partnerships with Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications large underneath U.S. authorities sanctions, and BGI Genomics, which owns corporations that the Commerce Department placed on restricted lists final March. Some U.S. officers say they fear G42 helps BGI attempt to accumulate genomic knowledge on thousands and thousands of Americans and others worldwide.
G42 invested $100 million final 12 months in ByteDance, the Chinese guardian firm of TikTok, and has investments in different Chinese corporations. Its $10 billion funding fund, 42X, has a Shanghai workplace whose new head is Jason Hu, a former government of JD.com, a big Chinese e-commerce firm.
The Biden administration has enacted commerce insurance policies to attempt to maintain China from buying superior chips and different instruments that will assist it surpass the United States in creating rising applied sciences, together with A.I. and quantum computing.
When The Times contacted G42 for the November article concerning the administration’s issues, a senior government, Talal Al Kaissi, stated the corporate sought to “remain in full compliance” with U.S. authorities laws. He added that the corporate had been speaking to American corporations about changing its know-how infrastructure, which incorporates Chinese {hardware}.
After the article was revealed, Mr. Gallagher stated in a briefing with reporters on Nov. 29 that “the trend line of where the U.A.E. is headed in its natural relationship with China is rapidly moving in the wrong direction.”
G42 has investments from Mubadala, an Emirati sovereign wealth fund, and Silver Lake, an American personal fairness agency.
G42 has declined a number of requests from The Times to interview Mr. Xiao. The Financial Times revealed an interview with Mr. Xiao on Dec. 7 during which he stated that G42 was transferring to chop ties with Chinese {hardware} suppliers like Huawei in favor of U.S. corporations.
But G42 is tightly intertwined with Chinese enterprise figures and corporations. The Wire China reported final month that company information present G42’s chief funding officer, Zhang Xiaoping, was additionally the chief working officer of Yitu Technology, a Chinese firm. The Biden administration put Yitu on a sanctions record in 2021 for creating surveillance know-how utilized by Chinese officers within the repression of ethnic Uyghur Muslims.
Mr. Zhang runs two G42 corporations in China: G42 Shanghai Investment and Beijing Qingzi Future Network Technology.
In addition, the report stated the Beijing agency’s basic supervisor, Li Xiaoxu, can be the supervisor of Pegasus Technology China, which was began in 2015 by Pegasus, an Emirati agency the place Mr. Xiao was chief government earlier than he was named to the identical position at G42.
All three of these Chinese corporations are among the many 13 flagged by the congressional committee.
In 2019, an Emirati agency Mr. Xiao led was concerned within the launch and operation of a social media app, ToTok, that U.S. intelligence businesses assessed was a spy software utilized by the Emirati authorities to trace the conversations of its customers. The knowledge harvested from the app, based on an American intelligence evaluation, was saved by an Emirati agency referred to as Pax AI, run by Mr. Xiao.
Chinese engineers helped create the app, and a forensic researcher who examined the app in 2019 advised The Times it seemed to be a replica of a Chinese messaging app providing free video calls, YeeCall, that was barely custom-made for English- and Arabic-speaking audiences.
The congressional letter named YeeCall as one of many corporations that the Commerce Department ought to scrutinize.
And concerning the DarkMatter corporations tied to G42 and Mr. Peng, the letter stated the community collaborates with Song-Chun Zhu, a lead researcher on the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, a prime state-supported scientific establishment.
One Emirates-based firm owned by G42 and named within the congressional letter is Presight AI, which sells surveillance know-how to police corporations worldwide. In March 2023, a New York Times reporter examined its show at a police convention in Dubai and located indicators of shut ties to China.
The firm marketed itself as a type of Emirati model of the U.S. knowledge firm Palantir. A video show provided a glorified model of the corporate’s capabilities, during which massive knowledge analytics foiled a drone assault on an workplace tower. A separate demonstration confirmed off the corporate’s bodily surveillance capabilities: A software program platform used cameras and facial recognition know-how to trace individuals on the convention.
The software program, which loaded in Chinese earlier than being translated into English, carried a lot of hallmarks of Chinese police software program. Although an organization consultant insisted it was constructed within the Emirates, it had a lot of options particularly catered to the China market, like web cafe monitoring and specialised labels for telephone monitoring not usually seen exterior China.
A Presight AI consultant on the police convention stated the surveillance software program had already been bought to a lot of international locations in Africa and the Middle East, and that it was being utilized by the Emirati authorities as effectively.