The Massachusetts Institute of Technology used funding from a twice-sanctioned Chinese company to advance components of facial recognition technology, which its Chinese benefactor has reportedly used to track and imprison Uyghurs, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
China’s largest facial recognition company, SenseTime, donated an undisclosed amount of money to MIT in 2018. Twenty of the 22 research papers that donation funded, the Free Beacon found, focused on or mentioned “neural networks,” which are used in facial recognition technology. Fourteen of the papers, meanwhile, covered image data or image recognition algorithms. Two researchers associated with Zhejiang University, which works on classified projects for the Chinese military, co-authored one paper with MIT researchers on “artificial neural networks.”
While it’s unclear how SenseTime may have used the research it funded, the company’s facial recognition technology has reportedly helped China commit genocide. SenseTime’s tech is part of a “vast, secret system” the Chinese use to “track and control” Uyghurs, the New York Times reported in 2019. The Trump administration that year blacklisted SenseTime for its role in the “repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance” of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, preventing it from receiving technology or exporting it to the United States. Two years later, in 2021, the Biden administration banned U.S. investment in SenseTime.