The Associated Press has published the results of an extensive investigation showing that successive U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have for decades permitted and frequently assisted American technology companies in selling sophisticated surveillance-related products to China’s security apparatus, even as Washington publicly condemned Beijing’s human rights abuses and warned of national-security threats. The report, based on open-records requests, congressional testimony, lobbying disclosures, and dozens of interviews, describes a persistent policy failure that persisted under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.
The investigation’s findings stretch from equipment sales in the early 2000s to profit-sharing agreements forged by the Trump administration in 2025. In August, Trump announced a deal with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD that would lift export controls on advanced chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent cut of the revenue, despite concerns from national security experts that the hardware would end up in the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services. Trump also disclosed that the U.S. government had taken a roughly 10 percent stake in Intel, valued at about $11 billion. The White House, the Commerce Department, and the State Department did not respond to the AP’s requests for comment on the arrangements.
The direct financial link between the federal government and chip exports — giving taxpayers a direct stake in the profits for the first time — is the sharpest recent example of what critics call a pattern of policy failure driven by the tech industry’s massive lobbying footprint. An AP analysis of lobbying disclosures found that technology and telecom companies, along with their trade associations, spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past two decades on lobbyists who listed key China-related trade bills on their quarterly reports. “I think we’ve been naive or complicit in the extreme,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J. “What do all those companies all have in common? A big wallet,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “That is as much as anything is what’s behind the fact we haven’t made as much progress.”
The lawmakers were specifically addressing a legislative effort that has failed four times since September: proposals to close a loophole that allows Chinese entities to rent powerful U.S. AI chips through cloud computing services, sidestepping export bans. The bills prompted a swift lobbying response from more than 100 tech-industry representatives, according to disclosure documents, and each attempt collapsed. The AP investigation found that Chinese companies barred from buying cutting-edge hardware can use services such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services overseas to train their AI models. Even sanctioned Chinese surveillance giants Dahua and Hikvision — blacklisted over human rights abuses in Xinjiang in 2019 — market networked surveillance services to foreign customers using AWS and Azure, according to company websites and procurement documents.
The cloud-services loophole is one of several enduring policy gaps. The first U.S. prohibitions on exports to Chinese police, enacted after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, were narrowly written to cover “crime control and detection” equipment such as restraints, helmets, and batons. But they left out the advanced networking, server, and software platforms that American firms would later supply to police and government clients. Lawmakers introduced bills to close the gap in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013, and every one failed. “Money talks,” Smith said. “When they flood certain members on strategic committees with the money, PAC money and the like, how much easier it is to listen to their narrative that somehow they’re part of the reform?”
The U.S. government itself sometimes acted as a sales facilitator. Archived webpages show that the U.S. Commercial Service under both the Bush and Obama administrations regularly promoted opportunities for American firms in the Chinese “safety and security” market, hosted webinars on how to sell to China’s public sector, and invited companies to showcase surveillance-related products at trade expositions. In 2010, the agency spotlighted on its website the opportunity for U.S. companies to supply equipment to China’s central government for “city-wide infrastructure of security, surveillance, and alarm systems.” That same year, the State Department’s human rights report warned of police surveillance and detentions of activists, yet the U.S. ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, led a trade mission to the heavily policed Xinjiang region, where thousands of ethnic Uyghurs had been detained after deadly unrest the year before.
The AP investigation also documents repeated regulatory attempts that stalled. Kevin Wolf, an assistant secretary in charge of export controls at Commerce during the Obama administration, said he began drafting a rule in early 2016 to regulate certain surveillance-gear sales but was told the draft was too complicated and it foundered. In the final months of the Biden administration, Commerce floated an updated version of that draft alongside sprawling chip-export rules, but the surveillance-focused measure again stalled after industry pushback. “The result would slow business considerably and likely result in the loss of customers that do not present any national security or human rights concerns,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in a filing late last year.
Nvidia said in a statement that it does not make surveillance systems or software and does not work with police in China. Intel said it complies with export-control policies. Microsoft denied providing services to Hikvision. None of the denials addressed the full scope of the cloud-services or reseller loopholes identified in the investigation.
Chinese activists who testified before Congress described the human toll of the technology sales. Zhou Fengsuo, a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen protests who was imprisoned and later became a U.S. citizen, told the AP he was “extremely disappointed” in American policy. “It’s driven by profit, and that’s why these strategic discussions have been silenced or delayed,” he said. “This is a strategic failure by the United States.” Gulbahar Haitiwaji, an ethnic Uyghur now living in France, was detained in Xinjiang internment camps for more than two years after policing systems incorporating U.S. technology identified her as a “terrorist.” She described being under “constant, excruciating surveillance, with cameras watching her even in the toilet,” according to the AP. “It’s truly disappointing that the United States, one of the most powerful countries in the world, would sell such technology to China despite knowing the potential for serious consequences,” she said.