MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and other universities have collaborated with Chinese state-run AI labs linked to China’s surveillance and security systems — the same systems that fuel China’s genocide of the Uyghur people in East Turkistan (Xinjiang).

Funding and joint research ventures have aided China’s development of a digital surveillance regime designed to identify, track, and detain Uyghurs for simply existing, often under the same “counterterrorism” logic used in the U.S.-led “Global War on Terror.”

Here are just a few examples:

• MIT and Johns Hopkins co-developed the “AlphaTracker system,” which helps with identity recognition and “continuous monitoring of individuals in crowded or obscured settings,” with the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI).

• Stanford partnered with SAIRI on biomedical imaging technology that “can be extended from medical diagnostics to large-scale human identification and monitoring.”

• Carnegie Mellon’s conducted research with Zhejiang Lab on multi-object tracking capabilities — a core enabler of automated surveillance: it underpins systems that follow multiple individuals or vehicles across crowded environments.

Across East Turkistan, surveillance cameras line the streets and armed guards man checkpoints. Chinese police use apps to collect personal data, linking every individual to a national ID and feeding it into a centralized database for mass surveillance and control of the Uyghur people. This data is then used to criminalize ordinary, peaceful acts — such as donating to a mosque, traveling abroad, or using a smartphone — flagging them as “extremism” and funneling individuals into China’s mass incarceration system.

You can learn more through this recent report by Strategy Risks and Human Rights Foundation.  

Take action now: Tell universities to sever ties with Chinese state-run AI labs and stop aiding the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people.