The United States is engaging in a broader range of espionage against China, including Chinese companies, to address the country’s status as both a military and an economic threat, the deputy C.I.A. director, Michael Ellis, said on Tuesday.
During a rare public speaking appearance, Mr. Ellis said the nature of intelligence collection by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had evolved considerably since they were created during the Cold War to spy on the Soviet Union.
Unlike past geopolitical rivals, China “poses a fundamentally different kind of threat to us because the competition is economic,” Mr. Ellis said at a cybersecurity conference in Washington.
Western officials say that under Communist Party rule, China does not have an independent business community akin to the United States or much of Europe. Mr. Ellis said that makes Chinese companies a legitimate target for espionage in areas like artificial intelligence, semiconductors and biotechnology.
The C.I.A. has needed to broaden its spying mandate because valuable intelligence about those technologies is “not found in the same places that political or military foreign intelligence is found,” Mr. Ellis said. Such information, he added, is “resident in the private sector — or in which China has to come as close as you might describe as a private sector.”
Mr. Ellis’s remarks are a subtle departure from a precedent established by previous administrations, which generally sought to draw a line between espionage that the United States considers permissible, such as intelligence gathering conducted for the purposes of national defense and foreign policy, and spying that is economically motivated.
The Obama administration, for example, routinely called out Chinese hacking of intellectual property from American companies, ultimately signing an accord with Beijing in 2015 in which both sides agreed not to engage in economic espionage. The United States later accused China of violating the agreement.
U.S. officials, however, have long privately acknowledged that it can be difficult to define what constitutes legitimate espionage. But they have traditionally not said so publicly.
“We’ve always collected intelligence in some way, shape or form,” Mr. Ellis said in a short interview after his public comments. “What’s different now is it’s not just about tanks, missiles and submarines.”
The timing of Mr. Ellis’s remarks is also significant. President Trump is scheduled to host the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, this month for a state visit. Competition around A.I. and trade is expected to be among the topics discussed during the summit.
Mr. Ellis’s remarks came on the same day the Trump administration issued a public advisory warning that Chinese artificial intelligence companies were engaging in “industrial scale” theft of trade secrets from their U.S. counterparts.
The alert, issued by the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, listed several leading Chinese A.I. companies that it said were engaged in the practice, which is known as distillation, since at least 2024.
“The sheer scale of these campaigns and their sophistication indicate that distillation is not a supplement to these companies’ A.I. model development, but the critical core of it,” the advisory said, echoing earlier accusations from Trump administration officials.
In his remarks, Mr. Ellis praised recent overhauls at the C.I.A., including the elevation of a cybermission center last year, that he said allowed the agency to achieve the Trump administration’s national security objectives. Among the successes, he said, was the U.S. raid in Venezuela in January that led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
“That operation was only made possible by a flawless intelligence picture, and that flawless intelligence picture was built on cyberoperations” at the C.I.A., Mr. Ellis said. “Without that kind of operational picture, being driven by cyber, we wouldn’t have been able to help enable U.S. Special Forces to identify the location of Nicolás Maduro and apprehend him within four minutes of landing on the ground.”
Mr. Ellis also briefly spoke about threats to U.S. critical infrastructure posed by foreign nation-state hackers. He said that a compromise of U.S. telecommunications networks known as Salt Typhoon and linked to China remains “a very critical threat” nearly two years after it was discovered. That operation and recent attacks on other targets, including municipal water systems that officials believe were carried out by Iran, highlight the need for the government to do more to protect the United States, he added.
“There is a whole host of threats to our critical infrastructure, and it’s an area where the government needs to also do a better job of helping the private sector to protect itself against these threat actors,” Mr. Ellis said.
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