The importance of artificial intelligence to national security is a rare area of consensus between America’s political right and left, and between Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley. But disagreement is emerging around the issue of tech talent and the large number of Chinese students studying in the United States and getting jobs in the tech industry. 

That finding and more were unveiled Monday by former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and former Defense Deputy Secretary Bob Work in a new report for Congress. Since March, their National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence has been looking at how the U.S. can retain an edge over China and other AI-seeking rivals. 

The good news out of the report is that policy-makers and defense leaders are addressing the bad news, which is that the United States’s position of tech leadership in AI is dissolving rapidly, said Work and Schmidt. The government still isn’t spending enough on AI research and development, despite some recent increases, and there is too much red tape around the Defense Department, they tell lawmakers. The Defense Department currently has about 600 artificial intelligence projects and is working to unite them under the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. The report applauds many of the military’s small, pathfinding projects but says the department has yet to scale them up successfully.  In other words, Schmidt and Work’s key concerns are ones with which most Defense Department leaders and politicians would agree. 

The commission identified near-unanimous concern about China surpassing U.S. capabilities on the battlefield; stealing intellectual property; and dominating research, development and commercialization of AI. Schmidt frequently tells audiences that China is funding its plans to dominate the field by 2030. Consensus on what to do about the high level of entanglement between the U.S. tech sector and China is far more elusive, particularly when it comes to employees, Schmidt and Work said. 

For years, attracting foreign students and tech workers to the United States has been considered essential for the growth of the American tech sector, which employ an increasing number of Chinese-born computer science grads and post-grads. More than 350,000 Chinese students were enrolled in U.S. universities in 2017, and make up an increasingly large portion of undergrads. But as President Trump has targeted China’s infiltration into the U.S. economy, talented Chinese students are beginning to look elsewhere. Top U.S. graduate business programs report that applications from China are falling as those students turn from American schools to Asian ones. 

“One of the things the commission investigated pretty carefully is how dependent we are on China today. The answer, which some people may not want to hear, is that we are dependent on Chinese researchers and Chinese graduate students,” said Schmidt. 

Work called it “one of the hard problems,” that the commission has been grappling with. “As you can imagine, because this is a national security commission, we’ve had some briefers who have really recommended decoupling [or separating economically] as much as you possibly can, because of the threats of [intellectual property] theft, etc. But then there’s another group that says, ‘No, in the area of AI, and especially in the area of research, entanglement is a virtuous thing.”

Some already are pushing for more decoupling.

“It might seem that welcoming Chinese students to the United States — and letting them experience a liberal culture where freedom of speech, religion, and politics is celebrated rather than persecuted — would be the first step toward creating opposition to the [Chinese Communist Party] at home,” says retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, former senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, in his new book Stealth War.  But, he says, the trend of Chinese academic immigrants comes with strings attached and they differ significantly from other immigrant student populations. China, he says, maintains a firm grip on Chinese immigrants living in the United States, making it unlikely or impossible that the Chinese researchers abroad  will ever feel empowered to confront the Chinese government. “In fact, Chinese students are advised not to fraternize extensively with American students and maintain close contact with other Chinese foreign students.”

The Pentagon already is tracking Chinese students. In 2018, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, or DIU, that interfaces with Silicon Valley and other tech hubs, published a paper that looked squarely at the issue of China’s influence over the U.S. technology sector, including the issue of Chinese tech workers and students in the United States. 

“China set a goal of bringing back 500,000 Chinese overseas students and scholars from abroad by 2015,” the DIU report reads. One example is a Chinese program called “‘Spring Light’ which pays overseas Chinese scientists and engineers to return home for short periods of lucrative service that may include teaching, academic exchanges, or working in government-sponsored labs. In addition, ‘Spring Light’ includes a global database of Chinese scholars to match specific technology needs to pools of overseas talent.”

The report lists “Immigration policy for foreign students” as “primary defensive levers” as part of a future policy framework. 

Michael Brown, the head of DIU who played a key role in drafting the paper, took a more nuanced view of the issue in conversation with Defense One last year. 

“Our strong preference — because we live in Silicon Valley and see the positive effect of immigrants that live in this area — were strongly in favor of allowing those folks who have work in STEM fields to get green cards and stay and contribute to our economy,” he said. “Right now, the situation is that we’ve educated those folks, so they’ll be leaving with their master’s and Ph.Ds in engineering, math, or whatever they’ve studied.”

So what to do about the trend of Chinese students attending American universities and taking positions in American tech companies? One thing to do not do, says Schmidt, is freak out. They play an important role, he says, and the U.S. needs them. 

“There’s a framing that somehow we could decouple all of those links and the report makes very clear, and the subsequent reports [will] make even stronger, such a decoupling at the human level would hurt the United States,” he said. “I want to repeat that: If you take those people out of the research chain it will hurt the United States. Because they are strong, helpful, may even stay in the country if they can get visas, and so on,” he said. 

The U.S. needs those Chinese experts, they argue. There are key areas in artificial intelligence where China and the U.S. share common interests, such as helping to create more reliable standards and practices for artificial intelligence, thus improving safety, said Work.

“So, for instance, both the United States and China, and Russia and all AI competitors want explainable AI and want AI that is trustworthy and reliable,” he said. 

“In my view, there is no danger in cooperating, entangling ourselves with researchers and competitors to get to that one thing we all agree on. We may use our AI for different things but we all agree that we want trustworthy and reliable AI. This is one where we’re trying to thread the needle between those who want decoupling and those who want coupling,” said Work. 

The report released Monday is a primer for a future report to come next October, which will surely be more controversial, as they will provide specific recommendations in terms of what the Pentagon can do better, how the government can spend better, and where, specifically, the U.S. can decouple from China. 

For right now, the message to lawmakers is “We’ve concluded that either of the two poles is not possible,” said Work. “We’ll try and thread the line in the final report and say, this is where we think we should couple, and this is where we think we should decouple.”

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The big picture: As trade tensions between China and the US continue to make headlines, Apple has found itself in the general conversation once again. Apparently, the company shares some data with a Chinese tech giant, which has led some to believe that it isn’t able to hold up to its high standards for privacy. While most people would take that as “Apple bowing to China,” it’s more important to reflect on the fact that we don’t live in an ideal world where things are that simple.

Most may not be aware of it, but Apple’s web browser has been sending data to Google Safe Browsing for years. This is done to protect users against phishing scams, by using an interstitial screen that prevents you from visiting a known fraudulent website from Google’s list.

Now it appears that for everyone running the latest version of iOS, Apple is sending some of your web browsing history to Chinese Internet giant Tencent. This has sent critics up in flames about the potential privacy implications, especially since the feature is enabled by default and requires some digging to find it.

If you go to Settings > Safari, you’ll find some small print that has recently been changed to say that “before visiting a website, Safari may send information calculated from the website address to Google Safe Browsing and Tencent Safe Browsing to check if the website is fraudulent. These safe browsing providers may also log your IP address.”

Cryptography expert Matthew Green explains that this poses a privacy risk because it could reveal both your IP address as well as the web pages you are visiting. He says there’s also a great possibility that Google “may drop a cookie into your browser during some of these requests.” This essentially means that someone could use this information to piece together a profile of your browsing behavior.

Fortunately, Google has made some changes to the relevant API that should, in theory, provide anonymity using a locally stored database which contains hashes instead of the actual addresses of known malicious websites. Every time you visit a new website, Safari will hash the URL and check if it matches something from the local database.

However, this approach isn’t perfect. As you visit hundreds or even thousands of websites over time, you gradually leak your browsing history. It’s also worth noting that you need to trust Google not to make use of this vulnerability. The company is already under investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission under allegations that it may have been circumventing GDPR rules to perform a more subtle form of data mining for advertisers.

The good news is you can easily turn off the “Fraudulent Website Warning” feature in Settings under Safari, but this still doesn’t explain why Apple didn’t see the need to be more transparent about it. The company released a statement to say that Tencent is only used as a source for the list of fraudulent websites if the region setting on the device is set to mainland China.

This isn’t the first time the company has been criticized for working with a Chinese entity to handle sensitive data. Last year it transfered iCloud servers for Chinese users to a state-run company, which yielded similar privacy concerns.

More recently, Apple has been under fire for its somewhat peculiar relationship with China. CEO Tim Cook had to defend the company’s stance after it removed a Hong Kong protest app from the App Store, a move that led many to believe Apple may be favoring Chinese interests as a way to appease the government of its third largest market.

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