Why senator says US should spy more on China’s companies

Go back a decade and most Americans had never heard of Huawei. Today, the Chinese telecom giant is a symbol of how quickly China can dominate a strategic technology sector and in the process create new national security and market threats for U.S. government and industry.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is now worried about another Chinese company that he predicts will eclipse Huawei in both scale and consequence: BGI. It is not building cell towers or smartphones for the 5G era. It is collecting DNA.

“If Huawei was big, BGI will be even bigger,” Warner said at the CNBC CFO Council Summit in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.

BGI is one of the largest genomics companies in the world. It operates DNA sequencing laboratories in China and abroad. It processes genetic data for hospitals, pharmaceutical firms and researchers across dozens of countries, according to a recent report by the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.

The company began as a Beijing-based research entity, the Beijing Genomics Institute, tied closely to China’s national genome projects. It later expanded into a global commercial powerhouse, selling DNA sequencing, prenatal testing, cancer screening, and large-scale population genetic analysis, according to an NBC News report.

Through subsidiaries, BGI says it operates in the U.S. Europe, and Japan. In several countries, it helped built national genetic databases and pandemic testing systems.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that global footprint gives BGI access to one the largest collections of genetic data on Earth. Lawmakers have warned that genetic data is not just medical information. At scale, it becomes a strategic asset spurring a “DNA arms race,” according to a Washington Post report. DNA profiles can reveal ancestry, physical traits, disease risk, and family relationships, and when linked with artificial intelligence, the data can also be used for surveillance, tracking and long-term biological research tied to national security, according to the Washington Post’s reporting.

At the CNBC event this week, Warner continued to press for more focus on BGI. “They are hoovering up DNA data,” Warner said. “This level of experimentation on humans and intellectual property theft, we all should be concerned about it.”

Congressional investigators have previously warned that BGI maintains close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese military, according to a report from the House Select Committee on the CCP. They argue that China makes little distinction between commercial data and state security needs.

The ‘super soldier’ fear

One of the biggest fears tied to BGI and China’s broader biotech push is the possibility of a genetically enhanced soldier. U.S. officials have publicly claimed that China has explored human performance enhancement and military biotechnology. U.S. defense analysts say China’s research spans population DNA collection, military databases, and AI-driven human performance modeling, according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by U.S. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe in 2020, when he was Director of National Intelligence during President Trump’s first term.

Warner directly referenced those concerns this week.

“It’s terrifying,” Warner said.

Warner described China as a great nation and great competitor, and as a former telecom executive (he was among the founders of Nextel), he said what Huawei was able to execute on — producing good products at inexpensive prices before the U.S. and Western competitors were prepared — is a cautionary tale.

The BGI story looks uncomfortably familiar to Warner.

“Go back in time eight or nine years, and most people had never heard of Huawei,” he said.

Huawei rose by combining massive state support, global market access and aggressive pricing, not only outcompeting Western firms on scale and cost, but positioning itself inside the world’s telecom infrastructure before governments understood the security implications. Huawei was first placed on a U.S. trade blacklist in 2019, which banned U.S. firms from selling some technology to the Chinese tech giant over national security concerns. Chip restrictions on Huawei have since become even stricter.

But Warner said by the time the U.S. moved to restrict Huawei, “[we started to] lose a little.”

Much of the 5G backbone had already been shaped by Chinese technology.

During a separate interview with Javers at the CNBC CFO Council Summit, the Republican Chairman of the House committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Michigan congressman John Moolenaar, said “We’ve seen how they run the play of excess capacity, price manipulation, driving people out of business in different areas; they’re going to continue to run that play,” he said. “We want to be friendly with China, but China is not our friend. They are our foremost adversary,” he added.

The Soviet Union was a military and ideological competitor, but China, in tech domain after domain, Warner says — from telecom and 5G to AI, quantum computing and biotech — is a different kind of competitor.

Warner now sees BGI following a similar model in biotechnology. Like Huawei, BGI scaled rapidly with state support. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank Foundation of Defense of Democracies called upon lawmakers of both parties earlier this year to restrict BGI’s access to U.S. institutions.

Congress has been trying to pass various versions of the BIOSECURE Act, which would limit the ability of Chinese biotechs to operate in the U.S. Some U.S. hospitals and research institutions with ties to Chinese genomics firms are under federal pressure, according to the Associated Press, though some medical professionals within the U.S. say they risk losing key research support for core medical goals. BGI told the AP that the bill is “a false flag targeting companies under the premise of national security. We strictly follow rules and laws, and we have no access to Americans’ personal data in any of our work,” it said.

U.S. intel has moved too slowly, and disrupted key spying alliances

Warner said the U.S. intelligence apparatus has moved too slowly to recognize the biotech threat. He says that intelligence agencies focus too much on foreign governments and militaries, with less attention placed on commercial technology sectors. But in a world where technology supremacy is national security, Warner says more of our intelligence efforts need to reflect this shift.

Only in the past two to three years, he says, has the U.S. seriously expanded spying into AI, semiconductors, and biotechnology. Warner says we need a more “advanced approach” in this area, and he gave as one recent example when China’s largest chipmaker SMIC stunned U.S. officials by producing a six-nanometer chip despite sweeping U.S. export controls. The breakthrough showed that Washington had underestimated both China’s technical qualities and ability to work around restrictions. “We got caught off guard with the SMIC six-nanometer chip,” Warner said.

Warner is also worried that tracking China’s tech rise requires a type of deep cooperation with U.S. allies that the Trump administration has squandered, such as the global intelligence-sharing network called the “Five Eyes” alliance.

Those relationships are now under strain, he said, and key partners including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France have gone public in saying they are reluctant to share intel with the U.S. “They feel like we may be politicizing the intel product and that is not good news for America,” Warner said.

Underlying his concerns about the technology competition with China in areas including AI and biotech is the U.S. ceding the global lead in standards setting. For decades, the U.S. shaped the rules for wireless networks, satellites, and internet infrastructure. That dominance help Americans lead global markets, Warner said, but now China is aggressively positioning itself as the international standards setter.

Warner described the U.S. role in international bodies as one of the “secret sauces” in the era of America’s dominance of the global economy and technology, allowing the U.S. to leverage innovations occurring around the globe, “even if it didn’t arise in America.”

Across technology domains, influencing standards and protocols is critical to not only maintaining a competitive edge but also establishing ethical boundaries. “Will it be us or the Chinese?” Warner said. “The Chinese come in with clearly a less humanist approach. It’s been effective in lots of domains. We see it on standards-setting bodies. China floods the zone with lots of engineers, almost buying off the votes. We’ve got to reengage for American business and government,” he said.