Seems like a lot of unfounded claims there. Dunford doesn't even know what projects the Beijing office is researching, for example, what if they're researching

Seems like a lot of unfounded claims there. Dunford doesn't even know what projects the Beijing office is researching, for example, what if they're researching better Google Translate models for Mandarin? All of this is red baiting. Sure, China is conducting economic espionage, overlooks domestic players stealing IP, and structures joint-venture companies to benefit their domestic economy. But it's not a playbook they invented, the US during its rise from an agrarian backwater violated British IP on a regular basis, the US also conducts espionage all over the world, including information used to seal deals for the military industrial and aerospace industries. The real question is, how stupid do you think Google management is? After the last time they pulled out of China, do you really think they're going to host any "crown jewel" trade secret projects there? Moreover, AI is firmly in the "publish almost everything" phase. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, OpenAI, even Apple, are publishing ever major breakthrough they come up with. There's very little secrets going on. AlphaStar, BERT/Transformers, WaveNet, NMT, et al, the core underpinning of many products are being openly shared. This is just straight up scaremongering by government spooks attempting to force tech companies into compliance on the grounds of patriotism.