A U.S. Secret Weapon in A.I.: Chinese Talent

When the Defense Department launched Project Maven, an effort to remake American military technology through artificial intelligence, it leaned on a team of about a dozen engineers working at Google. Many of them, according to two people familiar with the arrangement, were Chinese citizens. The Pentagon was fine with that, they said, even amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing. Classified data was not involved, the Pentagon reasoned, and the American military needed the most qualified minds for the job. The Trump administration is now moving to limit Chinese access to advanced American research, as relations between the United States and China reach their worst point in decades.