CSIS Director Daniel Rogers appears as a witness at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa, in 2024. Canada’s spy agency has laid out steps tech startups should take to guard against Chinese interference.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Canada’s spy agency is warning Canadian tech entrepreneurs about showcasing their wares at international pitch competitions organized by China, events it cautions pose a serious risk to their intellectual property.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has issued a bulletin in tandem with U.S. partners, such as the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, that lays out steps tech players should take before agreeing to attend.
“International pitch competitions, particularly those affiliated with the Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party [CCP], can pose significant risks to Western tech startups,” CSIS said in the notice released late last week.
“Startups participating in these competitions can lose their intellectual property, have their data misused, and see their talent recruited by competitors.”
The notice said entities affiliated with the Chinese government and the CCP have for several years organized pitch competitions in cities across the United States and Canada, as well as other countries.
These competitions often encourage startups to pitch their innovative projects in hopes of winning paid trips to China to compete for cash awards, subsidies and investment, preincubation support, market-entry opportunities and other benefits.
The bulletin noted that organizers of one such 2024 competition in Atlanta later boasted of collecting “nearly 200 overseas talent projects” from the event.
Awareness of the possibility of covert Chinese influence on Canadian affairs has grown in recent years. In 2024, the first of two reports from a Canadian public inquiry into foreign interference said China was the most persistent and sophisticated foreign-interference threat to Canada.
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Last week’s bulletin said a Chinese municipal government last year held pitch competitions in Canada, the United States, Australia and Britain, and “winners were pressed to create a business in the Chinese city and provide detailed banking, personal and passport data to receive awards and investment.”
The notice advised startups to consider filing for patent protection in Canada, in the U.S. and in the host nation of the event before the competition. “Publicly disclosing your invention before filing for patent protection can make it ineligible for patentability,” it said.
It added that the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) is a key player at these suspect events. It warned startups to verify the identity of pitch competition organizers and where they get their money, to read competition guidelines to learn how their data will be used and determine if organizers are compelled by law to share this data with their governments.
The bulletin said recent laws in China provide Beijing “enhanced legal grounds for accessing data of foreign firms in China.”
It warned entrepreneurs to assume they are being spied on if they travel abroad to pitch competitions.
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Many Canadian and U.S. startups are focused on artificial intelligence. China has a national plan to become the world’s technology leader in the field by 2030.
The FBI has long warned that Beijing has been pilfering Western-developed technology by targeting businesses, universities and government research facilities to get its hands on cutting-edge AI research.
In a report published in May, U.S. security company Strider Technologies warned that Beijing is rapidly expanding its AI infrastructure in a massive state-led effort to dominate the global high-tech landscape.
The report said that as of mid-2024, China had built or announced plans to build more than 250 AI data centres across all regions of the country.
Strider found that of the more than 300 AI stakeholders in China, 28 have collaborated on AI research since 2017 with organizations and companies based in Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
Of those 28 stakeholders, 18 also collaborated with People’s Liberation Army-affiliated institutes on AI research.
“This report should serve as a strategic warning to the United States and its allies,” said Strider CEO Greg Levesque.
“China’s AI infrastructure is not just a domestic capability − it’s a platform for reshaping global power dynamics and setting the standards for the future of artificial intelligence”
The Strider report said China is quickly developing new technologies such as “embodied intelligence.” These are machines that “can perceive and interact with the outside world in real-time” and are “already being integrated into PLA operations, with implications for surveillance, unmanned systems and cognitive warfare.”
