MIT has terminated a research collaboration with iFlytek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company accused of supplying technology for surveilling Muslims in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.
The university canceled the relationship in February after reviewing an upcoming project under tightened guidelines governing funding from companies in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. MIT has not said why it terminated the iFlytek collaboration or disclosed details about the project that prompted the review, but it has faced pushback from some students and staff about the arrangement since it began two years ago.
“We take very seriously concerns about national security and economic security threats from China and other countries, and human rights issues,” says Maria Zuber, vice president of research at MIT.
US companies and universities have built ties with Chinese tech firms in recent years. But the relationships have come under increasing scrutiny as relations between the two countries have soured.
MIT announced what was supposed to be a five-year collaboration with iFlytek with fanfare in June 2018. Since then, iFlytek has helped fund a range of research on subjects including human-computer interaction, new approaches to machine learning, and applied voice recognition. Under the agreement, iFlytek selected existing projects to fund but MIT says the company did not receive special access to the work or receive proprietary data or code. The amount of money involved was not disclosed.
The arrangement became more controversial in October 2019, when the US government banned six Chinese AI companies, including iFlytek, from doing business with American firms for reportedly supplying technology used to oppress minority Uighurs in Xinjiang. In 2017, Human Rights Watch claimed iFlytek supplied police departments in Xinjiang with technology for identifying people using their voiceprints. Press reports paint a grim picture of widespread surveillance in the province, including the detention and disappearance of more than 1 million people.
iFlytek is one of China’s older AI companies, and while it specializes in voice recognition, it also offers tools for analyzing legal documents and medical imagery. Like other growing Chinese AI companies, contracts to supply software for processing
