Four Zhipu AI Founders Worked With Institute UK Calls a Spy Front

The research project, which ran for about four years from January 2018 to December 2021, overlapped with Zhipu AI's founding year in 2019. It aimed to develop AI tools for analyzing social media to detect major events and map individual relationships, with a core objective of building a knowledge base of "key figures related to China."

Li Juanzi, a Zhipu AI co-founder and Tsinghua University professor, led the project. Three other Zhipu AI founders, Tang Jie, Xu Bin, and CEO Zhang Peng, are listed in project documents as co-authors, co-inventors, or copyright holders. Of the five people identified as founders and key figures in Zhipu AI's interim report, only Chairman Liu Debing does not appear in the project documents.

MI5 explicitly links CGTRI to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) and has warned that institutions or individuals continuing research ultimately funded by CGTRI after the alert could face criminal prosecution. This development could intensify scrutiny from U.S. authorities, who previously restricted Zhipu AI's access to U.S. technology over alleged military support and systematic extraction of proprietary knowledge. The Chinese Embassy in London has rejected MI5's allegations as "groundless."