China’s Intelligence Ops Swamping the West

Commentary

In a landmark revelation on Nov. 13, Anthropic, an artificial intelligence research company, stated that it had disrupted the world’s first documented AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign, attributing it with high confidence to a Chinese state-sponsored group that weaponized Anthropic’s own Claude Code tool to infiltrate about 30 global targets, including tech firms, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies.

Anthropic was fortunate enough to stop China’s espionage operation, but over the past 20 years, many governments, universities, and businesses have all been victims of Chinese espionage.

China runs the world’s largest and most aggressive intelligence machine. It combines a large professional service with a deliberate human-wave strategy that Western democracies cannot match—and have not been able to counter. This is all laid out explicitly in “Chinese Espionage Operations and Tactics,” a 2025 book by Penn State professor Nicholas Eftimiades, who spent 34 years working in U.S. security agencies and is one of the nation’s experts on Chinese espionage. According to Eftimiades, China uses a “whole-of-society” approach to espionage that includes:

• the Ministry of State Security
• the Ministry of Public Security
• the United Front Work Department
• military intelligence units
• state-owned enterprises
• private companies
• universities and students
• ordinary citizens and Chinese nationals

In this system, the professionals are only one of many weapons. China’s most potent weapons are millions of potential nonprofessional collectors whom Beijing has deliberately weaponized.

In 2017, China passed its National Intelligence Law. Article 7 explicitly orders every Chinese citizen and every Chinese company—regardless of whether they are inside China or abroad—to assist intelligence operations when asked to do so as per Article 14. Refusal triggers severe punishment. Authorities can prosecute the refuser for “obstructing” state duties and detain them for up to 15 days without trial. Other Chinese laws and policies include penalties such as freezing assets, imposing heavy fines, blacklisting individuals and their families on the social-credit system (banning travel, loans, and school places), or simply harassing relatives until compliance follows.

China has essentially given its universities, state research institutes, and both state-owned and private enterprises a green light to steal foreign intellectual property with complete impunity. They know—and act on the certainty—that Beijing will never extradite them, never enforce a foreign court judgment, and never allow the original owner to collect damages inside China. Once the data crosses the border, the theft is final and irreversible, and according to the FBI, it costs the United States between $225 billion and $600 billion annually. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government rewards the thieves with research grants, tax breaks, “talent” titles, and fast-track commercialization through hundreds of official technology-transfer zones.

The result is deliberate overload. Western services dispatch a few dozen elite officers to cultivate high-value agents. The CCP dispatches tens of thousands of ordinary people on tiny, low-risk tasks: photograph a design, copy a sensitive but not secret paper, buy a restricted component, forward an email attachment, or embed GE engine designs in a sunset photograph sent to a family member in China.

Each individual act may or may not be particularly damaging, but taken together, they are devastatingly effective in stealing technology and IP. This approach has effectively stripped the West of its technological edge. Eftimiades calls it the grain-of-sand approach: “Instead of sending commandos with a submarine to steal one bucket of sand, China sends 10,000 beach-goers who each bring back a few grains.”

Former FBI Director Christopher Wray echoed this; he told NBC News that the scale of Chinese espionage “blew me away” and that “there is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas, and our economic security than China does.”

According to a 2017 report by the bipartisan Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, “The theft of American IP is not just the ‘greatest transfer of wealth in human history,’ as General Keith Alexander once put it; IP theft undercuts the primary competitive advantage of American business—the capacity for innovation.”

What’s more, trade secret theft is estimated to cost the U.S. economy between $180 billion and $540 billion per year.

The FBI runs roughly 2,000 active China-related economic-espionage cases and opens two new ones every single day—or 730 per year. Given how many investigative and legal resources are needed for each case, this is about as much as they can handle. But what they are actually prosecuting is just a small fraction of what the CCP is actually doing.

“There’s no way our folks can handle that type of onslaught of cases,” Eftimiades said.

Given the preceding, it might seem hopeless, but there are some concrete actions that could be taken to counter China’s wholesale intelligence operations:

1. Ban individuals with documented CCP ties from sensitive positions. Explicitly prohibit CCP members, “Thousand Talents” participants, or employees of sanctioned Chinese entities from holding security clearances or working on classified, dual-use, or critical-technology projects.
2. Require mandatory insider-threat programs in any organization receiving federal research and development money. Make reporting of suspicious contact with Chinese entities a condition of funding, with whistle-blower protections.
3. Create an allied “IP Defense Pact”: Five Eyes, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan sharing real-time threat data, harmonizing export controls, and jointly sanctioning theft-enabling firms and universities.
4. Impose automatic, severe sanctions for proven theft. Seize assets, deny visas, and tariff entire sectors when Chinese courts refuse to enforce Western IP judgments—making theft inside China economically painful.
5. Shift the burden of proof. Any Chinese national or company seeking access to Western sensitive technology must affirmatively prove no intelligence obligations under the 2017 National Intelligence Law or other laws.

These five steps, taken together, create an environment much more difficult for China to steal from and create penalties for China when it does. However, merely having some of these on the books or partially implemented will not stem the tide. Such measures need to be aggressively implemented and enforced; if they are not, the United States will continue to lose ground to a China that is already a formidable peer competitor.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.