Microsoft President Brad Smith recently testified to Congress about the company’s role in America’s AI race against China, while simultaneously allowing Chinese companies to access cutting-edge AI tools despite OpenAI’s restrictions on the communist country.
Microsoft’s Brad Smith recently testified before Congress, attempting to persuade lawmakers that his company is critical to the U.S. winning the AI race against global competitors like China. Yet Microsoft reportedly allowed Chinese companies to access and integrate vital AI technology from the west, which is now likely to be deployed to censor Chinese citizens.
Microsoft has nominally cut off the use of OpenAI services like ChatGPT in China, but these are reportedly still available to Chinese users via Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service. ByteDance, the Chinese tech company that owns TikTok, has already used access to OpenAI in its efforts to build a competitor.
In February 2024, the Chinese company SinoAge, an authorized distributor of Microsoft technology, finalized an agreement with Hong Kong IT firm Edianyun to integrate OpenAI technology into their products using Azure.
SinoAge is a subsidiary of INESA Intelligent Technology, part of the larger INESA technology conglomerate, a State Owned Enterprise (SOE) of the Chinese communist government. INESA’s holdings at one point included vehicle production for the Chinese military.
Another Chinese company, Beyondsoft, has told investors that it was one of the first Chinese companies to gain access to OpenAI through Azure.
This was confirmed in a 2023 report from Orient Securities, a Chinese investment bank, which wrote that Microsoft had “endowed [Beyondsoft] with an accrual of artificial intelligence work abilities, so that it has a certain technical accumulation in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge graphs, and intelligent speech recognition.”
These Microsoft-provided AI capabilities are likely to power the censorship of Chinese citizens. A New York Times investigation revealed that Beyondsoft plays a central role in the Chinese online censorship regime, which as early as 2019 employed 4,000 people in content review teams across a variety of locations in China. Or, as the Times put it, “censorship factories.” The political suppression that was once carried out by humans may in the near future – with Microsoft’s AI technology – be accomplished by machines.
Microsoft is just one of the tech companies who are talking about patriotism while seemingly maintaining a soft spot in their heart for communist China.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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