Microsoft is collaborating on an artificial-intelligence project with ByteDance — the Chinese Communist Party–linked tech giant that owns TikTok. Incredibly, that sort of collaboration between Microsoft, which is a defense contractor, and a major Chinese tech company with a checkered record seems to be perfectly legal.
CNBC reported today, in a piece titled “Microsoft and ByteDance are collaborating on a big AI project, even as US-China rivalry heats up”:
But as the world’s two largest economies pour resources into the race for dominance in the field, there’s also collaboration afoot. Indeed, some AI experts even say that cross-border cooperation is key to getting the most out of advancements in computing.
Engineers from Microsoft and China’s ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, are doing their part to advance that notion. Through a project called KubeRay, they’re working together on software intended to help companies more efficiently run AI apps.
At the Ray Summit this week in San Francisco, ByteDance software engineer Jiaxin Shan and Microsoft principal software engineer Ali Kanso discussed their progress with data scientists, machine learning experts and other developers interested in building large applications using open source software called Ray.
Per CNBC, the two engineers involved in the project told the Ray Summit audience that they meet every week to work on the project and that work on it began about a year ago. “We’re not in the same company, but we meet every week, we collaborate every week,” Kanso said.
That disclosure is already eliciting concern from U.S. officials, and not without good reason. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, responding to the news, referenced the party’s mass atrocities in Xinjiang, in which ByteDance is implicated:
Earlier this week, the U.S. State Department reaffirmed that the Chinese government is engaged in ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity: https://t.co/gd9Aj0y5pP
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) August 26, 2022
ByteDance has played a role in those abuses, in large part due to its extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the united-front political-influence network, as I detailed in National Review this month:
ByteDance’s collaboration with Chinese security organs is far from theoretical. ByteDance apps, such as Douyin, a TikTok-like platform available only in China, have long been vectors for content directed by the CCP. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) found in 2019 that ByteDance had signed agreements with the Xinjiang Internet Police and the Ministry of Public Security to disseminate Chinese party-state propaganda that denied or minimized atrocities against Uyghurs. Chillingly, there were indications that those agreements would entail “offline cooperation” between ByteDance and Xinjiang police departments, though it’s unclear exactly what that means. . . .
ByteDance has an internal Chinese Communist Party committee, which convenes employees to study party doctrine — employees pose for pictures at events, hoisting the party’s hammer- and-sickle flag. The members of the committee have pledged their allegiance to the party and have hosted internal events to study and discuss the promotion of party doctrine. Such committees may be standard in most major Chinese firms these days, but that does not make them innocuous.
And, remarkably, ByteDance has linked itself to Beijing’s sophisticated united-front system, through which the party influences nonmembers in China and attempts to undermine foreign democracies and influence people around the world. A ByteDance board member, Neil Shen of Sequoia Capital China, has a seat on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which acts as a convening body for key players in the united-front network, including academics, ethnic-minority leaders, and business figures loyal to the party.
The CNBC report is light on specifics about the project and the precise degree of coordination between Microsoft and ByteDance. Still, this is a noteworthy development, since Microsoft briefly held a massive Pentagon cloud-computing contract, before it was yanked away last year amid concerns about the process behind the award. Even without the landmark cloud-computing contract, the Seattle-based company has, in recent years, won other lucrative U.S. defense contracts involving everything from video-conferencing software to mixed-reality headsets to the military’s microelectronics supply chain
After the Pentagon reneged on the cloud contract, Microsoft issued a statement hailing its decades-long history of work with the Defense Department and vowing to continue to work in this space. The statement noted, “the DoD has a critical unmet need to bring the power of cloud and AI to our men and women in uniform, modernizing technology infrastructure and platform services technology.”
Some lawmakers want to create new rules prohibiting defense contractors from also working with foreign-adversary governments such as Russia and China. This news about Microsoft and ByteDance — which reveals an apparently legal yet eyebrow-raising arrangement — presents them with another aspect of this problem to address.