Report Exposes What PLA Researchers Did With America’s Most Classified Intelligence Programs
The FBI has been sounding the alarm for years – China operates the world's largest state-sponsored espionage program, opening a new counterintelligence case roughly every ten hours.
A bombshell new report reveals that researchers tied directly to China's military, nuclear weapons complex, and mass surveillance apparatus were embedded inside at least 14 of America's most sensitive intelligence research programs – and some of them are still there right now.
Chinese Spies Inside America's Most Classified Intelligence Programs
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, known as IARPA, is the research arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
This is not some obscure university grant program.
IARPA develops the cutting-edge technology that goes directly into America's spy agencies – facial recognition, speech interception, quantum computing, biometric tracking.
Now a report from Parallax Advanced Research – a federally funded nonprofit – has documented that since 2017, at least 14 IARPA defense projects included researchers simultaneously working for Chinese national laboratories, PLA military units, nuclear weapons developers, and state surveillance entities.
The program's lead researcher laid it out plainly: the Chinese weren't just collaborating – they were reverse-engineering American intelligence technology, replicating experimental designs, and feeding what they learned straight into China's military machine.
One of the most jaw-dropping cases involves IARPA's $11 million BRIAR Program – a system designed to identify and track individuals using gait patterns and body shape.
This is the technology America is building to catch terrorists and protect soldiers at the border.
The lead investigator on BRIAR is a Michigan State University faculty member who was simultaneously collaborating on the same gait-recognition research with Southern University of Science and Technology in China – an institution with documented ties to Beijing's defense research ecosystem.
It gets worse.
That same MSU researcher has also allegedly collaborated with the deputy director of China's liaison office in Hong Kong – a figure the U.S. Treasury Department placed on its sanctions list as a blocked entity acting on behalf of a targeted foreign government.
Michigan State, when asked about any of this, refused to answer and pointed reporters to its conflict-of-interest policy.
China's Nuclear Weapons Lab Breached America's Quantum Computing Research
The BRIAR case is serious.
What happened with IARPA's quantum computing program is a national security catastrophe.
A 2023 publication tied to IARPA's LogiQ Program – which advances quantum computing for the entire U.S. Intelligence Community – included a researcher from the China Academy of Engineering Physics.
CAEP is China's nuclear weapons lab.
It is subordinate to the Central Military Commission, serves as China's primary nuclear weapons research and development complex, and has been on America's Entity List since 2020 – meaning U.S. companies are legally prohibited from exporting semiconductors to them.
Yet somehow, a CAEP researcher ended up co-authoring research connected to IARPA's most sensitive quantum computing program.
Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Cella reviewed the Parallax findings and called China's entanglement in these programs "grave national security threats," warning that America needs to immediately begin de-risking and, in certain sectors, full decoupling from Chinese institutions.
ODNI and IARPA, for their part, did not respond to a single request for comment.
How Biden's DOJ Shut Down the Chinese Espionage Hunt and Handed China a Gift
This isn't a case of China outwitting a vigilant government.
This is what happens when Democrats treat national security as a bureaucratic inconvenience.
The Obama administration spent years encouraging U.S. universities to deepen research ties with Chinese institutions – framing Beijing's Thousand Talents Program, which the FBI has formally identified as a vehicle for technology theft, as legitimate academic collaboration.
When the Trump administration launched the China Initiative in 2018 to prosecute exactly this kind of infiltration, Democrats and their allies in academia screamed about racial profiling until Biden killed the program in 2022.
Biden's Justice Department shut down the China Initiative right as Chinese researchers were still embedded inside IARPA programs involving nuclear weapons and quantum computing.
The Parallax report's co-author, L.J. Eads, was direct: "This report only scratches the surface of a much larger and more serious research security problem."
China set a target of achieving military parity with the United States by 2027 – including in nuclear and strategic domains.
They aren't building that capability on their own.
They're building it with American taxpayer-funded research, developed inside American intelligence programs, by researchers who were simultaneously drawing paychecks from the People's Liberation Army.
Trump cleaned out the intelligence community for a reason.
The question now is whether Kash Patel and the new ODNI leadership will audit every IARPA program still employing researchers with ties to Beijing – and how much damage was done while Democrats were busy calling the investigators racists.
Sources:
- Philip Lenczycki, "Exclusive: US Intel Funded Projects Riddled With Chinese Gov't-Linked Researchers," The Daily Caller News Foundation, February 23, 2026.
- L.J. Eads, Intelligence Compromised, Parallax Advanced Research, February 2026.
- U.S. Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2025, December 23, 2025.
- U.S. Department of Justice, "The China Initiative: Year-in-Review (2019-20)," Office of Public Affairs.
- U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, Specially Designated Nationals List, U.S. Treasury Department.
- U.S. Federal Register, "Addition of Entities to the Entity List," June 5, 2020.
