On Sept. 30, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, named a Beijing research institute that it says exists mainly to pay for academic work improving the spying tools of China’s Ministry of State Security. More than 100 academics based in Britain, it said, had contributed to projects the institute funded.
The institute is the China General Technology Research Institute, or CGTRI, sometimes translated as the China Academy of General Technology. According to MI5’s alert, the work covered artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, covert communications systems and steganography, the hiding of data inside ordinary files. The agency said the institute had “very strong ties” to the ministry and that its “primary purpose” was research that “directly improves MSS technical capability for espionage.” It was the first alert MI5 had published on its own. Dan Jarvis, the security minister, wrote to every vice-chancellor in the country asking universities to help their staff “end all arrangements with this company,” Times Higher Education reported.
Under the alert lies a harder problem for the government. Much of this money appears never to have passed through a British university’s books. UK-China Transparency, a research group, published an analysis the same day that traced the funding to a grant program the institute has run since 2015 with China’s main state science funder, usually through co-authors based in China. Britain has built its research security rules piece by piece since 2019 to catch foreign investors buying control of research, sensitive technology leaving the country and foreign researchers coming in. The one legal duty to monitor universities’ overseas funding was passed in 2023 and has never been switched on. Most of what remains is guidance asking universities and their academics to work out for themselves who is paying.
After a decade of grants, MI5 has now done that work for one funder. The agency said many academics and institutions had dealt with the institute “in good faith” because of its “obfuscated links” to the ministry, and that some may not have known it was paying for the Chinese projects they had joined. Publishing the alert changes their legal position. From now on, the agency said, anyone who continues such work risks prosecution under the National Security Act 2023 and should get independent legal advice.
How the money moved
The trail runs through the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Beijing’s main public funder of basic science. The foundation’s 2016 program guide describes an NSFC-GenerTec Joint Fund for Basic Research, set up with the China Academy of General Technology in 2015, and lists steganography and steganalysis among its topics. GenerTec is the short English name of China General Technology Group, a state-owned conglomerate, and Times Higher Education reported that the institute belongs to a state-owned conglomerate. The fund still exists. A 2026 notice on joint funds from NYU Shanghai’s research office lists the institute as a sponsor.
UK-China Transparency, which published its findings alongside the alert, found guidance documents for the fund from 2015, 2016, 2023 and 2026. Under those rules, according to the group, the institute helped select and evaluate projects, its staff had to be involved from the start, applicants had to consult its office before applying and the results went to the institute. Papers credit the fund under several English names, among them “NSFC-Tongyong Union Foundation.” Some papers acknowledge grants tied to it only as foundation grants, without naming the institute.
The topics changed over 10 years. The 2015 list, as the group reported it, included mobile communications security, post-quantum cryptography, coverless information hiding and image steganography. The 2016 additions included text recognition for Tibetan, Uyghur and English, identifying people from their lips, target tracking, detecting anonymous communications and electronic forensics. The 2026 list asks for analysis of cryptocurrency transaction graphs, password guessing with large language models, passive underwater acoustic location, security for A.I. agents and language models that analyze events in Southeast Asian languages.
The group identified Guo Yunbiao as the institute’s director in 2020 and said he is affiliated with Beijing’s University of International Relations, which it described as uniquely close to the Ministry of State Security. It published 16 grant codes it links to the institute. It also named 15 British universities, listed in no particular order, that it said should review their exposure urgently, among them University College London, Cambridge, Manchester, Warwick and Southampton. It cautioned that a grant code on a paper does not show that a British co-author was paid, knew about the institute or had any tie to intelligence.
That caveat matters, because accounts differ on what the British academics actually received. The Guardian reported that the institute had given money to at least 100 researchers at British universities in return for access to their research, which was then passed to the ministry, as UPI recounted. MI5’s own wording is narrower: the academics “contributed to” projects the institute funded. UK-China Transparency said the usual pattern involved co-authors based in China and did not claim that any British author had direct contact with the institute.
The warnings before
In July 2019, the National Cyber Security Centre gave Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee evidence on where the government’s power ended. The committee published it four years later.
Government has no way of stopping a university collaborating with a Chinese Professor or a Chinese company
That September, the government’s protective security advisers and the cyber center launched their Trusted Research guidance at the annual conference of Universities UK, the sector’s umbrella group. In February 2021, a report by the Civitas think tank, Inadvertently Arming China?, mapped research ties between up to 15 British universities and 22 Chinese universities linked to the military, as well as weapons makers and other military-linked companies. Its authors, Radomir Tylecote and Robert Clark, did not accuse any British institution of knowingly helping China’s military.
The intelligence committee’s report came out on July 13, 2023. It found that universities had received too little advice on, or protection from, either Chinese influence or the theft of their research. “While some have expressed concern, others seem to be turning a blind eye, happy simply to take the money,” it said. It called for a public register of donations to universities, kept by the Department for Education and monitored by the Home Office’s State Threats Unit.
In April 2024, the heads of MI5 and the National Cyber Security Centre briefed the leaders of 24 universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. Oliver Dowden, then the deputy prime minister, promised a consultation that summer on security clearance for some university staff and a stronger process for making funding sources transparent, Fortune reported. A general election followed in July. It was not clear whether the consultation was ever published.
The warnings kept coming under Labour. In November 2025, MI5 warned lawmakers that Chinese agents were posing as headhunters to reach them. In February, Ken McCallum, MI5’s director general, and Richard Horne, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, briefed senior leaders from more than 70 universities. The government also put £3 million into countering interference on campus, including a new Academic Interference Reporting Route for university leaders. In June, the Five Eyes intelligence partners warned that Chinese spies were recruiting through online job platforms.
What the rules reach
For universities, the government’s main point of contact is the Research Collaboration Advice Team, set up in 2021 and now part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. According to its March 20 update, the team has 19 staff, 13 of them advisers, and since March 2022 has worked with more than 155 research institutions, recording more than 3,800 engagements and handling more than 500 cases. Most of those cases, it said, were raised by contacts at universities. By its own description, it gives advice.
The Trusted Research guidance is advice, not law. The National Protective Security Authority says more than half of Britain’s research comes from international partnerships and urges universities to check their research and funding partners. The legal duties are elsewhere, and each was written for a different risk. The National Security and Investment Act of 2021 lets ministers review purchases of control over companies and assets, including intellectual property, in 17 sensitive areas of the economy, as Universities UK’s guidance explains. The Academic Technology Approval Scheme requires foreign postgraduates and researchers to get a certificate before studying or working in sensitive subjects in Britain, unless they come from the European Economic Area or a short list of allied countries. Export controls govern what leaves the country.
The Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, in force since July 1, 2025, comes closest. Its enhanced tier covers arrangements with specified foreign powers, research included, which must be registered within 10 days and before any work begins. Breaking that rule carries up to five years in prison, according to a briefing by the law firm DLA Piper. Only Russia and Iran are on that tier. In the Commons in November 2025, Mr. Jarvis said “no decision has yet been made with regard to China specifically.” The same briefing cited a Financial Times report that the government was considering naming selected Chinese state-linked bodies rather than China as a whole.
Then there is the law that was supposed to show where university money comes from. Section 9 of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 would have the Office for Students monitor universities’ overseas funding, but only for risks to free speech and academic freedom. Labour paused the act after taking office in July 2024. When it revived the act, it held the funding section back, saying in a policy paper that it would keep the section under review while the foreign influence scheme took effect. On April 20, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said she would “keep commencement of the overseas funding measures under review.” David Kernohan, deputy editor of the higher education site Wonkhe, wrote on Sept. 30 that the section, never in force, “does not address espionage” in any case. He identified a different gap.
There is no national database of international research collaborations
Compare the institute’s grants, as UK-China Transparency describes them, with that list. A Chinese state funder pays a researcher in China. No British asset changes hands, no British university receives the money, no visa is issued and China is not on the register’s enhanced tier. What remains is the question MI5 now puts to individual academics. That question covers a lot of work. British and Chinese researchers co-wrote 126,540 publications from 2018 to 2023, second only to the 230,166 Britain produced with the United States, according to Elsevier figures cited in written evidence to Parliament. Mr. Kernohan wrote that “it is very hard to trace the ultimate source of funding for overseas partners.”
The law after the alert
Section 3 of the National Security Act makes it a crime to engage in conduct likely to “materially assist a foreign intelligence service” when a person knows, or “ought reasonably to know,” that it is likely to do so, according to the statute. The maximum sentence is 14 years. Section 17 covers accepting or keeping a material benefit from a foreign intelligence service under the same knowledge test, with an exception for legitimate payment for lawful goods or services, The Register reported.
Publishing the alert matters most for that knowledge test. “It can now be said that anyone engaged in research supported by CGTRI ought to know about links to the MSS,” Mr. Kernohan wrote. He noted that “enforcement and guidance has hitherto happened behind the scenes,” and read the public alert as a sign that “the usual behind-the-scenes methods have not been effective enough this time.”
The old law failed in the most visible China case of recent years. In September 2025, prosecutors dropped charges under the Official Secrets Act of 1911 against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, who were accused of passing information to Chinese intelligence. That law required proof that China was an “enemy.” Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions, told lawmakers that the government’s witness would not say China had been a current threat at the time of the alleged offenses, ABC News reported. Both men denied wrongdoing, and neither was tried. Section 3 of the new act asks only whether the help went to a foreign intelligence service.
Mr. Jarvis, whose department now has a law without that hurdle, posted about the alert on X the afternoon it was issued.
MI5 has issued an alert exposing Chinese intelligence’s attempts to obtain and use our academics’ expertise and research. This activity undermines our national security.
We’ll always take the necessary action to keep our country safe.
Chris McDonald, the science minister, said international collaboration would “always be crucial,” adding, “We can’t ignore the risks.” The government said it was making sure universities had the advice and support to protect their research.
The objections
China’s embassy in London called the accusations “imaginary and purely fabricated,” said cooperation between British and Chinese universities was voluntary and lawful, and said it had lodged a formal protest with the British government.
We urge the UK intelligence authorities to stop spreading falsehoods and stop undermining educational exchanges and research cooperation between China and the UK.
Readers on Reddit and Hacker News raised sharper versions of the case against the alert. On Reddit’s r/China forum, one argued that the research was public anyway.
Someone needs to tell MI5 that anything the researchers published is literally public. The AI and cybersecurity research can be obtained by a journal subscription
That is true of the papers themselves. It does not answer what MI5 and the fund’s own guidance describe: a funder that, according to UK-China Transparency, helped choose the projects, had staff involved from the start and received the results. If MI5 is right about the ties, a body linked to an intelligence service was choosing which problems got worked on and who worked on them. Neither MI5 nor the group has published evidence that anything beyond published work changed hands, and the alert does not say that it did.
On Hacker News, a reader who said he had no connection to British academia or counterintelligence doubted that naming one institute would accomplish much.
...China could spin up a hundred new front companies in the time it takes them to type “CGTRI”.
Charles Parton, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, made a similar point to the Guardian: “The Chinese are not stupid. If they want to hide the origin of someone, they’ll do it.” The fund’s own paperwork shows how easily that can happen, since some of its grants appear on papers only as foundation money. Meia Nouwens of the International Institute for Strategic Studies told the paper there had not been “a great deal of discussion of what areas of research constitute a national security risk.” Sam Goodman of the China Strategic Risks Institute said there was “a lack of a coherent steer from government on something like AI.” On this, the objection holds up. An alert about one funder doesn’t tell an academic how to spot the next.
On r/geopolitics, another reader questioned MI5’s judgment about China, pointing to its record.
I have little faith i the ‘china literacy’ of Mi5 (or mi6 for that matter. Or actually most western governments in any capacity). They’ve previously jumped to some rather hysterical conclusions, such as when they publicly ‘outed’ Christine Lee based on seemingly nothing.
The record on Christine Lee points the other way. In December 2024, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that MI5’s 2022 alert naming the London lawyer was lawful and proportionate, the South China Morning Post reported. Ms. Lee was never charged. The Cash and Berry case collapsed over the legal meaning of “enemy,” not because a court found the evidence false, though that also leaves the allegations untested. The stronger complaint is that MI5 has not shown its evidence this time. In public, the case for the ministry link rests on MI5’s word and on the staff overlaps UK-China Transparency found.
The American precedent cuts both ways. The Justice Department ended its China Initiative on Feb. 23, 2022, after Matthew Olsen, head of its national security division, said the program had “fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias” and discouraged scientific collaboration, NPR reported. Mr. Olsen also said its cases had been driven by genuine national security concerns. MI5 named an institution, not individuals, and said most people who dealt with it acted in good faith.
What comes next
On Sept. 15, replying to the Commons science committee’s report on science diplomacy, the government said it would “launch a Research Security Fund to support research security risk management and protective security measures in UK research institutions.” It also promised a research security strategy by the end of the year to “set out a single government view of research security,” Research Professional News reported. It has not said how much money the fund will have. Andrew James, a professor at the University of Manchester, said his understanding was that “a very large proportion” would go to strengthening universities’ own capabilities.
A Chatham House paper by Tahlia Peterson, published Sept. 17, said Britain’s research security policies are hard to apply in practice. It cited fragmented governance, uneven capability across institutions, universities’ reliance on fees from international students and incentives that reward growth and international ties. Ms. Peterson recommended building research security into the Research Excellence Framework, which grades university research, and giving public funders such as UK Research and Innovation a larger role. She also called for more transparency about foreign affiliations.
Universities UK, which represents 142 universities, said its members “take their responsibilities around research security and national security extremely seriously.” Vivienne Stern, its chief executive, told the BBC that the sector had made “significant investments in recent years to strengthen due diligence, risk assessment and research security processes.” Iain Duncan Smith, a Conservative lawmaker and co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, told the BBC that several reports had suggested universities’ dependence on Chinese students “has opened them up to all sorts of problems,” and he called for tougher security checks.
Two decisions that would change the rules have no deadline: whether to add China, or named Chinese state bodies, to the register’s enhanced tier, and whether to bring the overseas funding duty into force. The strategy is due by Dec. 31. Until it is published, MI5’s instruction stands as written: academics should “establish the ultimate funding source when conducting any research collaboration with Chinese institutions, to ensure CGTRI is not involved.”