# China warns it will hit back as U.S. names its tech firms ‘legitimate intelligence targets’

*Friday, September 11, 2026 at 4:05 PM UTC — Hamer Intelligence Services Desk*

**Published**: 2026-09-11T16:05:37.476Z (1h ago)
**Category**: geopolitics | **Region**: Global
**Importance**: 8/10
**Sources**: OSINT
**Permalink**: https://hamerintel.com/data/articles/17537.md
**Source**: https://hamerintel.com/summaries

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**Deck**: China’s Commerce Ministry says Beijing has the “firm resolve and sufficient means” to respond after a senior CIA official called Chinese AI, chip, and biotech companies “legitimate intelligence targets.” The exchange turns an already sharp tech rivalry into a more explicit intelligence confrontation, raising risks for firms caught in the middle.

China and the United States are no longer just competing over who leads in advanced technologies. They’re now arguing openly over whether those technologies, and the companies that build them, are fair game for espionage.

China’s Commerce Ministry has warned that Beijing has the “firm resolve and sufficient means” to respond to U.S. intelligence operations aimed at Chinese companies. The statement followed remarks by CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis, who described Chinese firms in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotechnology as “legitimate intelligence targets.”

In diplomatic language, that’s a sharp escalation. By publicly characterizing entire sectors of another country’s private economy as appropriate intelligence targets, a senior U.S. official is signaling that Washington sees China’s tech ecosystems as tightly intertwined with the state and the military. Beijing, for its part, accuses the U.S. of turning what it portrays as normal economic competition into an all‑fields national‑security confrontation.

For Chinese companies in those sectors, the exchange isn’t just rhetorical. Being explicitly labeled as intelligence targets increases the likelihood they will face more aggressive cyber probing, surveillance of executives’ travel and communications, and efforts to map their supply chains and partnerships. It also puts foreign partners, investors, and customers on notice that their own interactions with these firms may draw more attention from U.S. agencies.

On the American side, Ellis’s comments reflect a belief that Chinese advances in AI, chips, and biotech are not simply commercial but feed into military modernization and surveillance capabilities. U.S. intelligence agencies have long tracked Chinese state‑owned defense conglomerates and telecom giants. Expanding that lens to a broader swath of ostensibly private tech firms marks a deepening of that approach.

Strategically, this widens the playing field of the U.S.–China rivalry. Export controls on advanced chips, investment screening for sensitive technologies, and sanctions on specific entities were already pushing the two economies apart in key areas. Treating large categories of Chinese tech firms as intelligence targets risks normalizing state‑on‑state espionage that plays out through corporate networks and research collaborations.

For global supply chains, the consequences are messy. Multinationals that rely on Chinese AI tools, chip foundries, or biotech inputs now have to consider not just the risk of future sanctions, but the possibility that their Chinese partners are under active intelligence scrutiny. That can weigh on joint ventures, data‑sharing arrangements, and cross‑border R&D, especially in sectors like healthcare and autonomous systems where both sides worry about dual‑use applications.

The friction also complicates efforts to set any boundaries around AI or biotech cooperation. If each side assumes the other will use commercial platforms as both collection targets and potential instruments of influence, the incentive to ring‑fence domestic champions from foreign involvement grows stronger.

The question is no longer whether technology is part of the U.S.–China security rivalry, but how much of the modern economy each side is willing to pull into that space.

Signals to watch include whether Beijing responds with its own explicit targeting language or restrictions on U.S. tech firms operating in China, whether there’s a visible uptick in cyber incidents linked to state groups on either side, and how quickly multinational companies move to localize sensitive data and redesign supply chains to avoid becoming collateral in an intelligence tug‑of‑war.