Microsoft Warns of Chinese Cyberattacks While Maintaining Ties to China’s Research Institutes

Microsoft has been continuing to warn that the U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattacks from China — yet has still maintained closed ties to Chinese government research institutes that could serve as the training grounds for the communist country’s army of hackers.

Earlier this week, Microsoft’s own analysis provided yet more evidence of how Chinese cyberattacks threaten the U.S. Yet the tech giant remains deeply tied to the communist-run country, more than many other tech companies. The tech giant does not seemed concerned to be deeply involved with researchers in a country that blurs the lines between developing technology and hacking it.

Microsoft maintains a close working relationship with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS, 中国科学院), a prestigious research academy run by the Chinese government whose institutes have recently been sanctioned by the United States for alleged attempts to acquire U.S. technology to support Chinese military modernization, records show.
Open-source documents show that Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Microsoft’s flagship research institute in China, has engaged in research exchanges and technical training of CAS scholars. In at least one case, Microsoft also funded a CAS program.

CAS has long drawn scrutiny from the US government given its status as a Chinese government entity that conducts cutting-edge research into dual-use and sensitive technology, such as advanced AI and quantum computing. In 2022, the CAS Institute of Computing Technology was added to the Department of Commerce’s Entity List, which targets foreign organizations that “pose a significant risk of being or becoming involved in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”

Microsoft has hosted multiple researchers in residency programs at Microsoft Research Asia from the Institute, including at least one who was mentored after the Institute’s designation as a sanctioned entity.

In May 2024, the Department of Commerce added four more CAS institutions to the Entity List. The CAS units were added “for acquiring and attempting to acquire U.S.-origin items in support of advancing China’s quantum technology capabilities, which has serious ramifications for U.S. national security given the military applications.”

In September 2024, the House passed H.R.1516 (DHS Restrictions on Confucius Institutes and Chinese Entities of Concern Act), which, if approved by the Senate, would classify any organization affiliated with Chinese Academy of Science as a “Chinese entity of concern,” barring it from cooperating with US higher educational institutions.

CAS Visiting Scholars at Microsoft

Microsoft has worked closely with CAS for years on several initiatives, including advanced AI and other sensitive technologies. Many of those partnership involved mentoring of CAS researchers by Microsoft.

The Star Track Program (铸星计划) is a visiting scholar program at Microsoft Research Asia. The Star Leap Program (星跃计划) is a similar initiative for graduate students, launched in 2021. Microsoft has highlighted several notable alumni of these programs who are affiliated with the CAS.

Shortly after the CAS Institute of Computing Technology was added to Entity List in December 2022, Microsoft hosted Liu Guodong, a Ph.D. student at the CAS Institute, for a year through the Star Leap Program while he researched “high-performance Distributed Deep Learning” with mentors from both MSRA and Microsoft Research in the US.

A Microsoft Chinese-language press release about the mentorship program described his work at Microsoft (translated by Google):

After finishing the day’s scientific research work, Liu Guodong, a PhD student at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, walked out of the Microsoft Building, and raised his head to star points. His headphones contained the warm melody of the Soda Green Band.

Through the ‘Star Leap Project’ one year of internship at the Microsoft Asian Institute, Liu Guodong – under the guidance of two mentors, Miao Houshan, a senior research and development engineer at the Microsoft Redmond Institute, and Saeed Maleki – revolved around the acceleration of deep learning models.

As intended, “The Star Leap Project” builds a bridge between outstanding talents and the research teams of the two major research institutes of Microsoft, creating an opportunity for them to focus on real frontier issues together. According to Liu Guodong, this “scientific research trip across the ocean” not only allowed him to realize his scientific research ideas, but also gave him a new epiphany in thinking methods and scientific research taste.

Other examples of CAS researchers from the Institute of Computing Technology mentored by Microsoft include:

• Professor Yao Di, Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Star Track Program 2022. Yao is an expert on trajectory data, useful in tracking and predicting the movements of objects in real time.
• Professor Xiao Li, Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Star Track Program 2021. Xiao’s work during his program involved the application of AI to biological and physics research.

A complete roster of who was accepted in these programs and what they worked on is not publicly available, but it is likely there are more CAS affiliates in these programs than the few mentioned in the Microsoft blog posts cited above.

Microsoft Co-Authored Research with CAS Scientists

Chinese and Western databases show several scientific publications that were coauthored by Microsoft and CAS researchers (or students at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, computer vision, and even cybersecurity.

A non-exhaustive list of examples includes:

• Position: Rethinking Post-Hoc Search-Based Neural Approaches for Solving Large-Scale Traveling Salesman Problems, Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (2024).
• Q-Sparse: All Large Language Models can be Fully Sparsely-Activated, preprint (2024).
• The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bits, preprint (2024).
• Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli, preprint (2023).
• Introduction to the Multimedia Intelligence, Special Issue of the Journal of Image and Graphics], Journal of Image and Graphics 9 (2022).
• Optimization from Samples, Big Data Research 5 (2021).
• Correlation-Aware Heuristic Search for Intelligent Virtual Machine Provisioning in Cloud Systems, Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2021).
• Generative adversarial networks: from generating data to creating intelligence, Acta Automatica Sinica 5 (2018)
• Information Security Technology – ICT Supply Chain Security Risk Management Guide — Formal national standards guideline issued in 2018. The committee formulating the standard had experts from Microsoft, CAS, and several state bodies and Chinese tech giants.

Microsoft Ties to CAS Go Back a Decade

Records show Microsoft and CAS scientists have interacted regularly for over a decade and maintain ties today.

Examples include:

• A CAS member sits on the advisory committee of the Microsoft Research Asia Theory Center, established in 2021.
• In 2017, a chief researcher of the Knowledge Computing Group at MSRA visited the CAS Institute of Automation to present work on big data/text analysis.
• In 2014, several high-ranking Microsoft scientists, including Padmanabhan Anandan of Microsoft Research and Zhou Ming of MSRA, visited the CAS Institute of Computing Technology to discuss machine vision research (specifically related to sign language recognition). A CAS web post noted the existence of a Visual Information Processing and Learning Research Group (所视觉信息处理和学习研究组) at CAS, funded in part by MSRA.

Microsoft’s deep ties to Chinese researchers, one that even covers cybersecurity research, is at odds with the inescapable reality of Chinese cyber-threats, which Microsoft’s own analysis has revealed.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.