She says ensuring this technology is not transferred to Beijing may help to maintain the present balance of power in the region, as the US currently enjoys leadership around AI.

Civilian and military applications

At the centre of ASPI's concern is a collaboration between the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a state-owned defence conglomerate with research laboratories that helped Beijing develop the country's first nuclear weapon.

CETC is funding the UTS collaboration with $20 million over five years for areas including AI, autonomous systems and quantum computing, all of which have both civilian and military applications.

The collaboration originally named CSIRO, Australia's top scientific research agency, among those participating, but this has since been denied.

Australia's former top spy David Irvine, who now chairs the Foreign Investment Review Board, indicated last month greater attention would be paid to Australia's data assets in foreign takeovers. Alex Ellinghausen

A spokesman for CSIRO said it was not involved in the collaboration with UTS and CETC.

UTS said all its co-operation with CETC was conducted under strict federal government guidelines around the transfer of defence and strategic technologies and that it had conducted a "comprehensive risk assessment" on the partnership.


"All of the research collaboration between UTS and CETC is on early-stage, dual-use technologies, that have no direct or immediate military application, and is openly published in peer-reviewed international journals," a UTS spokesman said.

Dual-use technologies

The ASPI report also says there has been "extensive collaborations on dual-use AI technologies" with researches linked to China's People's Liberation Army and the Australian National University and the University of NSW.

"Despite the genuine advantages they may offer, such problematic partnerships can also result in the transfer of dual-use research and technologies that advance Chinese military modernisation," the report says.

The ASPI report recommends a review of all recent and existing partnerships in this area to outline the potential "dual-use risks" and for these findings to be made public.

More controversially it advocates the updating of export controls and investment reviews in areas where dual-use technology is a potential risk, while ensuring these restrictions are also applied to sensitive data sets associated with the development of AI.

Australia's former top spy David Irvine, who now chairs the Foreign Investment Review Board, indicated last month greater attention would be paid to Australia's data assets in foreign takeovers.

"Another emerging focus for the FIRB has been data protection and the important role that data centres play in the digital economy," he said in the FIRB's annual report.