A former top scientist from Harvard University has defected to China – giving the country an edge in the global race to develop the world’s first AI super-soldier.
Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, has resurfaced as the founding director of Shenzhen’s Institute for Brain Research Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies, also known as i-BRAIN.
Lieber was convicted in 2021 of lying to the feds about his ties to China and retired from Harvard in 2023.
Scientists in the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party have been working on brain-computer interfaces — Lieber is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field — to boost mental agility and situational awareness to engineer super soldiers.
The Ivy League scientist was convicted in 2021 of lying to the feds about his ties to the Thousand Talents Program, a Chinese state scheme to poach foreign researchers. He was promised $750,000 a year to set up a research lab in China while he was at Harvard, and hid funds he received from the Internal Revenue Service.