NOTE: This is the third post in Strider’s series on the PRC’s 15^th Five-Year Plan (FYP). The first post provided an overview of the 15^th FYP’s major themes. The second post examined the AI+ Action Plan in detail. This post examines the 15^th FYP’s talent strategy and the structural workforce gaps driving it.

For decades, leaving the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for a career in the West was the benchmark of professional ambition. A position at a top American university or technology company was the ultimate destination, and most who reached it did not come back. Today, that is no longer a safe assumption.

The number of recent Chinese graduates from overseas universities who are returning home has more than doubled since 2018, and the trend is accelerating. Chinese companies are now dispatching recruiters around the world and authorizing salaries that match or exceed what local firms are offering. A recent LinkedIn survey of overseas Chinese PhD students last year found that 59% planned to return after graduating, up from 38% the year before. 

The conditions pulling talent back to the PRC—tightening immigration policy, tenuous bilateral relations, and a political environment that has made some PRC-born researchers feel professionally constrained—have converged at a moment when Beijing is better positioned than ever to receive them. The 15^th Five-Year Plan (15^th FYP) explicitly lays out a strategy to capture talent and turn it into a sustained competitive advantage.

A Deficit That Cannot Wait

The scale of China’s advanced technology workforce gaps makes external recruitment a strategic necessity. China’s semiconductor industry faced a shortfall of approximately 700,000 workers in 2024. The digital economy’s talent gap reached 30 million by the end of 2025. Demand for skilled AI talent alone will require nearly six million professionals by 2030. No domestic training pipeline closes deficits of that magnitude within a five-year window. The plan’s answer is to compete for talent that already exists, targeting scientists and engineers currently working at universities, laboratories, and technology companies in the United States and Europe.

A World-Class Talent Engine

The 15^th FYP’s central talent mechanism is a proposed state-led “world-class talent engine” designed to attract leading experts in priority technologies by offering research autonomy, globally competitive pay, and optimal working conditions. They are targeting established scientists and engineers who have built careers at leading Western institutions and would need a compelling reason to leave. Alongside this, the Plan contains a proposal to establish a “high-tech talent immigration system” explicitly designed to cultivate world-class talent—a structural mechanism intended to make the pathway from overseas recruitment to domestic integration faster and more formalized than anything that preceded it.

The most direct expression of that ambition is a proposed “New Thousand Talents Program” to be launched by Beijing municipality, targeting 1,000 top scientists drawn primarily from the United States and Europe in sectors including AI, information technology, synthetic biology, and advanced materials. The original Thousand Talents Program has drawn sustained scrutiny from Western governments and law enforcement agencies concerned about undisclosed foreign affiliations and technology transfer. Recasting its successor as a municipal initiative rather than a national one reflects both the continued appetite for external expertise and an institutional memory of what drew attention the first time.

National Direction, Regional Execution

The Plan structures talent development the same way it structures most major priorities: central policy direction executed through regional ecosystems. Shanghai is strengthening mobility across universities, research institutes, and enterprises, building the conditions for researchers to move fluidly between sectors. Zhejiang Province is pursuing tighter academia-industry alignment and introducing hybrid appointments such as “science vice presidents” and “industry professors,” positions designed to embed researchers in commercial environments without severing their academic connections. Guangdong Province has formalized dual-appointment recruitment models that place professionals in overlapping roles across industry and academia, supported by mass-scale programs including “Million Talents to Southern Guangdong.”

Each approach reflects the same underlying objective: advanced technology development requires researchers who can move between scientific discovery and industrial application. PRC institutions have historically sought to strengthen that mobility to address talent shortage and support the transition of research into commercial and strategic outcomes. The plan seeks to advance that objective by strengthening regional talent, research, and commercialization ecosystems while maintaining national coordination over strategic direction and priorities.

The Financial Case for Returning

Regional governments—operating in parallel with, and in support of, the Plan’s broader talent agenda—have moved to make returning to the PRC financially attractive at the individual level.

Shenzhen is offering tax breaks and the equivalent of more than $700,000 in subsidies for qualified overseas returnees. Shanghai’s Pudong District is providing roughly $14.7 million in project funding to top young talent in science and technology. Other Shanghai districts are targeting PhD holders who have held senior positions abroad, offering living allowances of up to nearly $300,000 and free or subsidized office space for startups. These programs are the financial infrastructure through which the Plan’s talent objectives get executed on the ground.

Financial offers are often reinforced by something harder to quantify. Researchers who have returned describe a sense of professional possibility that felt out of reach abroad—the chance to lead large-scale projects, build teams, and work in industries moving fast enough that seniority can be earned quickly. That perception, whether or not it holds universally, is part of what Beijing is selling.

What the 15^th FYP Sets in Motion

The talent competition embedded in the Plan is concentrated in the sectors where geopolitical competition is most intense: semiconductors, AI, synthetic biology, and advanced materials. The professionals Beijing is targeting are currently employed at research universities, technology companies, and national laboratories across the United States and Europe. As Beijing scales its national and regional innovation ecosystems over the next five years, demand for advanced technology expertise will continue to outpace domestic supply, and pressure to source that expertise externally will grow with it.

The 15^th FYP frames talent acquisition as a foundational condition for executing the broader agenda. The financial instruments are in place, the regional infrastructure is being built, and the external environment is producing a pool of potential returnees larger than at any previous point.

Competition for the people who build and run advanced technologies is already underway.

By: Calder Walton, Strider Advisor and Director of Research for the Intelligence Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School

Opinion for The Cipher Brief

There is a growing perception among long-standing US allies that they need to expand commercial relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). A thaw or détente with the PRC brings both rewards, particularly for a sluggish economy like Britain’s, but also major risks. History shows that a superpower can ruthlessly exploit détente with the West.

Economic Security and Intelligence

Economic security and intelligence are nothing new. Before the Second World War, for example, Britain ran a small outfit known as the Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC). Run by a former MI6 officer, Desmond Morton, the IIC provided a coordination of intelligence on German rearmament and, working with MI5, assessed Britain’s commercial vulnerabilities. British intelligence helped to devise the UK government’s War Book, which set out emergency regulations to protect critical national infrastructure in the event of war. After the Second World War, during the Cold War, it became a staple of British and other western intelligence to assess the size and strength of economies behind the Iron Curtain.

Risky Business

In 1972 President Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, ushered in a policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Its purpose was to further divide the Soviet Union from China. Papers at the Nixon library show that Kissinger was under pressure from British firms, in particular, to open up markets behind the Iron Curtain. Britain was in a dire economic doldrum following an oil shock due to a war in the Middle East.

Kissinger and Nixon knew that not all commercial technologies could be transferred to America’s main strategic enemy, the Soviet Union. The White House was accurately afraid of dual use technologies, namely those that were civilian but could also be used for military purposes. Kissinger limited the sale of high end computers and microchips, for example, only allowing second tier components to be sold to the Soviets.

Although Nixon and Kissinger accurately guessed that US industries would be targets for Soviet espionage, the extent to which the Soviets exploited détente would have been beyond their wildest imaginations. The collection of scientific and technical intelligence from the US was conducted by Soviet military intelligence (GRU) and the KGB, whose operating arm, Line-X, reported to Directorate T (Technology). In 1973 the KGB assigned an officer to New York whose full-time job was to collect (steal) US scientific and technical intelligence (S&T). By 1980 the US was producing more S&T intelligence for Moscow than the rest of the world combined. Visiting Soviet trade delegations to US research centers, laboratories and fortune 500 companies, for example, were packed with undeclared Soviet intelligence officers. In an agricultural delegation of a hundred Soviet officials about one third were known or suspected Soviet intelligence officers. In one visit to a Boeing laboratory a delegate applied adhesive to his shoes to obtain metal samples. The size of the Soviet onslaught was so large that entire fields of US research and development became replicated in the Soviet Union. The East German spy master, Markus Wolf, recalled the East German computer company, Robotron, was, thanks to Soviet espionage, an unofficial subsidiary of IBM.

Soviet S&T espionage was often facilitated by sloppy security at US defense contractors. An employee of TRW Corporations in Redondo Beach, CA, which manufactured a US spy satellite, recalled that workers “regularly partied and boozed it up during working hours with the ‘black vault’ housing the Rhyolite [spy] satellite project”. Bacardi rum, he claimed, was kept behind the cipher machines and a cipher-destruction device was used as a blender to mix banana daiquiris and Mai-Tais.

Soviet espionage was so far reaching that, ironically, by the end of the Cold War both sides of the conflict, NATO and the Soviet Union, were dependent on US S&T.

Business Risk

Fast forward to the present day – a time when the world is vastly more complicated than the last century’s Cold War. Western countries did not need the Soviet economy. By contrast, China is intertwined with the world economy.

Beijing is seeking to portray Washington’s new approach to economic, defense, and foreign policies as undermining the post war rules based international order that it created. Meanwhile the PRC, which, has previously railed against the international order (though in reality it vastly benefited from that order), is holding itself out to be the stable player on the world stage. The PRC’s attitude is that it will play by the rules when it suits it but is happy to break them whenever it decides to do so.

Recent diplomatic outreach to Beijing by Western leaders include agreements framed as pragmatic economic wins. If middle powers, like Britain, for example, pursue a strengthening of commercial relations with China, they will need a strategy to mitigate risk like Nixon and Kissinger developed. Britain does not have a strategy for doing so. Even China hawks, like former US ambassador in Beijing, Nicholas Burns, have stated that for economic growth the US will need to continue to trade with China, but will need to carve out elements of national security and critical infrastructure. The latter is a principle stretching back to the UK government War Book.

There is no reason why the PRC would not seek to exploit a détente with the west as the Soviets did before. The Chinese state and its intelligence services have never encountered a western business whose intellectual property they did not want. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses a constellation of front companies to do business with the outside world. Often such companies will enter into business ventures to obtain intellectual property from their western counterparts, but then pull the plug, bankrupting their western counter parties. To add insult to injury, Chinese firms will often sell the product they have stolen back to western markets.

The name of the game for western businesses must therefore be risk mitigation regarding China. In the last century, governments held the monopoly on the know-how and intelligence critical to the technologies that shaped our world – nuclear weapons. It took state resources to detect technology transfer. Soviet S&T espionage was only discovered when French intelligence recruited an agent in KGB Line-X in the 1980s. The same is not true today. Private sector companies today hold the keys to innovations that will shape our lives this century – microchips, A.I., quantum and bioengineering. It is therefore private sector companies that are best placed to mitigate risk of stolen intellectual property. And unlike in the past, this can be done by using A.I. driven publicly available data.

By: Eric Levesque, President and Co-Founder of Strider Technologies

Opinion for LBC

Last month, the European Commission moved to block public funding for solar panel inverters from what it calls “high-risk vendors,” a category that squarely targets China’s technology giants, including Huawei.

Inverters are used in a range of energy systems, but in solar power, they are essential. It is a device that converts direct current into alternating current, the form of electricity used by the grid and by most homes, hospitals, and factories. They are also connected to the internet and can be monitored, updated, and, in some configurations, controlled remotely.

The Commission’s spokesperson was surprisingly direct about why. Foreign actors, she warned, could use inverters to manipulate energy networks and gain “unauthorised access to operational data.” She did not soften what that disruption could look like – the manipulation of electricity production, and the capability of a “remote shutdown… leading to countrywide blackouts.”

Huawei is among the vendors named in Brussels as high-risk, and British readers will remember the 2020 decision to remove the company from the UK’s 5G communications network. The concern then was straightforward; a company with deep ties to the Chinese state had no place in sensitive national infrastructure. That argument won, but Huawei never left the energy sector. As of 2022 it held a 26 per cent share of the European solar inverter market and has since struck deals with UK energy companies.

As Britain accelerates towards clean electricity by 2030, more and more inverters are entering our system from China. Imports of converters into the UK, Norway and Switzerland grew from 256 million kilograms in 2015 to 395 million kilograms in 2023. We are talking about a structural dependency embedded across the entire system.

At Strider, we have been analysing this issue for some time, and specifically at the pattern of Chinese state interest in exactly this kind of infrastructure. In 2020, researchers from the State Grid Corporation of China and the China Electric Power Research Institute, both state-linked institutions, published a detailed technical analysis of the blackout that struck the United Kingdom on 9 August 2019. They were studying the oscillations caused by UK wind farms and theorising how similar failures might be triggered by other renewable energy sources.

China’s researchers are mapping our vulnerabilities whilst China’s manufacturers become increasingly embedded in our infrastructure. The European Commission has now accepted, in plain language, that this combination represents a credible threat.

Which brings us to the particular challenge Britain now faces. When the EU restricts public funding from high-risk vendors in its energy infrastructure, displaced supply does not simply disappear. Manufacturers who can no longer access European public contracts will look for alternative routes to market. Britain, sitting outside the EU’s regulatory framework, risks becoming exactly that alternative route, a backdoor through which Chinese inverter technology re-enters European supply chains.

The good news is that the UK is well placed to respond. Britain has shown genuine leadership on economic security in recent years, from research security guidance to investment screening, and there is real appetite in government and across industry to go further. We now need to audit what is already embedded in the national grid, and close the backdoor: none of this is radical. It is the logical extension of work already underway.

The opportunity to get ahead of this is still open. It will not remain so indefinitely.

In one of the most infamous scandals in international banking, Deutsche Bank helped move an estimated $10 billion out of Russia without anyone inside the institution raising a flag. Between 2011 and 2015, the bank’s Moscow desk executed what came to be called “mirror trades”: Russian clients, including some tied to politically exposed and sanctioned networks, bought securities in Moscow while related counterparties sold the identical securities through the bank’s London office. Each individual trade looked routine. But the aggregate was a covert pipeline that moved billions in funds out of Russia through London and into offshore accounts, exposing the bank to regulatory penalties on three continents.

This case underscores a reality the financial industry is now grappling with. Banks, fintechs, digital asset platforms, and investment firms face risks today that have outgrown the tools built to detect them. The gap between what traditional compliance can protect against, and the evolving tactics and techniques of adversarial nations, is where strategic intelligence becomes essential.

A Growing Target

Governments in Western countries (including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, and throughout Europe) have designated the financial services and banking sectors as critical infrastructure. When a sector is classified as critical infrastructure, it signifies that its assets, systems, and networks are essential to national security, the economy, or public health. Failure or compromise of that sector would cause debilitating effects for society.

Because financial institutions sit at the center of global capital flows, regulatory scrutiny, and geopolitical competition, their systems, people, and partnerships are persistent targets for state-sponsored actors. The PRC’s systemic emphasis on data as a driver of national power ensures that banks and financial services companies will remain high-priority intelligence targets, valued less for their role as financial intermediaries than for their visibility into the broader ecosystems of strategic industries and capital flows. Banks serve clients in defense, energy, advanced technology, and critical infrastructure. They sit at the center of cross-border trade and investment. And they play a pivotal role in enabling corporate strategy, allocating capital, and shaping risk assessments, giving adversaries a window into the decision-making processes of global firms and governments—and the people who lead them.

State-sponsored actors seeking to infiltrate hiring pipelines, exploit third-party relationships, and influence deals are targeting enterprise banks whose innovation units are building AI, quantum, and cybersecurity capabilities. In the fintech and digital asset space, payment platforms, digital wallets, and crypto-processing environments hold high-value data and assets that adversarial governments are actively pursuing for leverage. And investment firms face growing enforcement from regulatory agencies, where even indirect exposure to sanctioned entities can trigger scrutiny and jeopardize funding.

The pressure is showing up across the sector. North Korean operatives have used fabricated identities to secure remote IT roles inside U.S. financial firms, funneling salaries back to the regime while gaining access to sensitive systems. Those schemes have helped the DPRK steal more than $6 billion in cryptocurrency. At Coinbase, overseas support contractorswere bribed by cybercriminals to exfiltrate customer data from inside the company. The result was a $20 million ransom attempt that affected tens of thousands of users. Cases like the Bitzlato CEO arrest and the JPEX exchange scandal tell a different but related story: undisclosed foreign control and executive-level misconduct at crypto platforms can trigger sanctions exposure, money laundering investigations, and lasting reputational damage.

Where the Financial Sector is Most Exposed

Understanding where adversaries are finding their way into organizations starts with understanding how exposure accumulates. It comes through hiring decisions made without full visibility, deal counterparties whose ownership structures aren’t fully traceable, and supply chain dependencies that no one has examined closely enough. For organizations across financial services, markets, and banking, the risk concentrates in three places.

The first is people. Financial institutions need to screen applicants, employees, vendors, and contractors for risky affiliations and falsified resumes, especially in high-trust roles across cybersecurity, fraud, money-movement operations, AI, quantitative research, and cyber R&D. These are the positions state-sponsored actors are working hardest to access, and they are doing so through falsified credentials, hidden affiliations, and ties to foreign programs that conventional background checks were not designed to detect. Rapid hiring cycles and remote-first work have expanded the surface area, making continuous vetting of both candidates and existing personnel essential.

The second is deals and partnerships. Every M&A transaction, IPO, fund onboarding, investment deal, and joint venture pulls new entities into a financial institution’s orbit, and each one can carry hidden ties, foreign control, or sanctions exposure that is rarely visible from the outside. Financial institutions need to be able to identify these risks across counterparties, customers, investors, LPs, board members, and global partners before a deal closes or a relationship deepens. Even indirect exposure, like adversarial capital or a sanctioned co-investor on a cap table, can trigger regulatory reviews and jeopardize investments. The Deutsche Bank mirror trading scandal is a case in point: the clients and counterparties behind the scheme were closely related entities with common owners, but the bank’s KYC (Know Your Customer) processes failed to surface those connections until billions of dollars had already moved.

The third is open source software and supply chain dependencies. Financial institutions increasingly rely on open source tooling in internal platforms and quantitative systems, as well as third-party crypto-processing centers, liquidity partners, and external infrastructure providers. Contributors to these tools and organizational dependencies can carry hidden nation-state ties, and without visibility into who is contributing to the code and infrastructure these institutions depend on, the risk compounds silently.

Case Study: Tracing an IRGC-Linked Network into European Real Estate

In 2025, reporting by Bloomberg and the Financial Times identified more than 400 million euros worth of European properties linked to Ali Ansari, an Iranian national sanctioned by the UK that year for providing economic resources to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Despite the designation, his holdings, which include London properties, hotels in Germany, and a resort in Spain, largely remain intact. They are held through a web of offshore companies and proxy individuals spread across at least eight jurisdictions. Any financial institution that encountered this network through a deal, a counterparty, or a vendor relationship would have had no way of knowing what sat behind it using standard screening tools.

Strider traced the network from beginning to end. Inside Iran, Ansari built a sprawling empire under the Tat Group name, with holdings in banking, finance, and construction. Tracing Tat Bank’s ownership through Iran’s corporate registry leads through his core construction entity, through multiple U.S.-sanctioned holding companies, and finally to Bonyad Taavon Sepah, the IRGC Cooperative Foundation. From there, the money moved west along a deliberately layered route. Iranian oil revenues, sold to China through sanctioned crude channels, passed through UAE intermediaries, into offshore holding companies in Saint Kitts and Nevis and the Isle of Man, then into Luxembourg and Dutch corporate vehicles, and finally into European real estate. By the time the capital arrived, it looked like legitimate Western investment on paper.

The network also depended on trusted individuals who could operate without drawing attention. Iman Rahimi Aloughareh held senior roles across Ansari’s Iranian businesses while simultaneously serving as founding managing director of the Luxembourg entities and the German operating company that anchored the European structure. Despite sitting at the center of a network with direct ties to the IRGC, Aloughareh has never been sanctioned. His name would not appear in any due diligence screen. This is exactly the kind of hidden ownership, foreign control, and sanctions exposure that financial institutions need visibility into, and exactly the kind that regulators, once they uncover it, treat as the institution’s responsibility.

How Strider Helps Financial Institutions

Strider is the leading provider of strategic intelligence for identifying and mitigating nation-state risk. The platform equips CISOs, insider threat teams, fraud and FinCrime leaders, compliance organizations, and investment teams with visibility into workforce risk, third-party exposure, and malicious communications.

For personnel risk, People Search and Falsified Resume Screening verify identities and surface risky affiliations before and after hire. Insights surfaces targeted technologies and associated employees most at risk from state-sponsored actors and provides tailored briefings to reduce recruitment risk across AI, quantum, and cyber R&D programs.

For deals, partnerships, and supply chain risk, Organizations Search maps multi-tier ownership and personnel ties for deal counterparties, investors, LPs, board members, joint-venture partners, and crypto-processing vendors. It supports M&A, investment banking, and strategic transactions by identifying foreign ownership, sanctions exposure, and hidden affiliations, and helps organizations better align with compliance requirements.

For open source software risk, OSS Search detects state-linked contributors across open source repos and assesses contributors and dependencies in tooling used in internal platforms or quantitative systems, helping prevent supply chain compromise. Shield feeds curated selectors into SIEM and DLP tools to identify, flag, and monitor geopolitical threats, including malicious emails, domains, and multilingual terms tied to state-sponsored cyber or recruitment activity targeting employees. Strider also provides expert analysis within its Intelligence Center on threats facing the financial sector—offering additional context on state-sponsored recruitment initiatives and efforts to identify and exploit vulnerabilities.

Looking Ahead

The financial services sector is operating in a rapidly changing risk environment—where the threats are geopolitical, the exposure is structural, and the cost of finding out too late keeps rising. Strider gives financial institutions the strategic intelligence to see what’s coming and act before it arrives.

For much of history, global commerce has operated under a set of stable and predictable assumptions that made both risk and relationships easier to navigate. Standard due diligence—a background check, quick database search, or conversation with a reference—was often enough to understand who you were hiring or who you were doing business with.

The relationships that mattered were visible. The risks that accompanied them were bounded. And the geopolitical environment, for all its turbulence, mostly stayed out of the way of routine commercial decisions.

Today, economic competition runs through a more contested global system—shaped by technological rivalry, supply chain realignment, and tightening constraints on the movement of capital, talent, and information. Organizations are being forced to confront questions they are not fully prepared to answer: Who actually controls the networks we depend on? Where are the exposures we haven’t examined closely enough? How do decisions that seem unrelated accumulate into systemic risk?

The challenge is a surplus of information with no clear way to make sense of it fast enough. The newly enhanced Strider Operating System (OS) was built to change that.

The Vision

“Data is oil. We do the discovery. We put the pipes in the ground. We built the refinery. And now the products go directly into the systems running the enterprise.”

That is how CEO and Co-Founder Greg Levesque describes Strider OS, the company’s new AI-native, agentic intelligence operating system built for this geopolitical era.It ingests billions of publicly available records across dozens of languages, resolves identities, maps relationships, and delivers finished intelligence into client workflows without ever touching client data. At its center is a digital twin of the industrial world, built down to the person level. Your employees, past and present. Your suppliers.  Your corporate relationships traceable through open sources. All in real time, mapped continuously, so organizational leaders can act with clarity and confidence.

Inside the System

Strider OS is not a product you log into. It is a centralized intelligence orchestration layer that sits across Strider’s data, models, and products, powering everything clients use and transforming how organizations access, interpret, and act on strategic intelligence. Clients interact with the intelligence it produces, not the system itself.

In practical terms, it takes raw global data across file types, formats, and dozens of languages and turns it into clean, structured, decision-ready intelligence. The guiding principle is cognitive deload: surface what matters and why it matters, enabling faster and more confident decision-making. Research tasks that previously took weeks of manual work can now be completed with high accuracy in a fraction of the time.

Every insight produced through Strider OS is grounded in validated, original source documentation. The system surfaces facts. It does not accuse, convict, or draw conclusions. Strider’s team of subject-matter experts manage every step of the data processing and analysis.

Three Agents, One Refinery

At the core of Strider OS is an agentic data refinery. Three specialized AI agents each handle a distinct stage of the intelligence production process.

• The collection agent continuously pulls in data across more than 110,000 primary sources, including sources from within adversarial nation-states.

• The methodology agent applies Strider’s proprietary analytical frameworks to transform that raw data into structured intelligence.

• The intelligence agent takes those structured outputs and assembles them into decision-ready strategic intelligence for organizational leaders.

Together, these agents maintain a dataset of over 25 billion objects spanning dozens of languages and countries. Inside that data, the same person can appear under different names, spellings, and affiliations across different sources. The refinery resolves those identities, maps relationships between individuals and organizations, and surfaces signals continuously, at a volume and speed no human team could replicate.

The Human Layer

Strider’s subject-matter experts on PRC, Russian, and Iranian statecraft work directly alongside engineers and data analysts at every stage of the intelligence pipeline. They identify which sources best answer nation-state risk questions. They manage the AI review process. They validate outputs before anything reaches a client.

The AI models Strider uses are internal tools that review source data at scale. One step in a longer process, overseen by analysts who know when something is right and when it falls short. No model is permitted to surface a finding untethered from original source documentation.

Nation-state actors deliberately obscure affiliations, shift tactics, and hide relationships. Catching that requires people who have spent their careers studying them. AI amplifies that capacity—making human judgement even more effective.

What’s New

Deep Research Reports

One of the major enhancements powered by Strider OS is Deep Research Reports: automated, analyst-level intelligence on entities tied to the PRC, Russia, Iran, and the DPRK, delivered in hours, not days. Previously, AI-generated research outputs were long, difficult to validate, and not shaped around the specific question a user needed answered.

Deep Research Reports work differently. Users define their research questions upfront, interact with the system, and provide context to shape the output. What comes back is a structured, narrative report built for executive decision-making, combining risk analysis, market context, and operational insight in one place. Evidence cards and source citations are built in throughout, so any finding can be traced directly back to where it came from.

Earlier Visibility into Geopolitical Risk

Historically, clients received a batch of analyst-built person profiles each month. Coming soon, Strider Insights—powered by Strider OS—will deliver every profile with risk that Strider has available, providing analyst-grade profiles at scale with decision-ready intelligence. These profiles will refresh monthly as new information is collected. With expanded coverage and automated analysis, organizations will gain deeper insight across more people of interest and will be able to actively engage with their full risk landscape.

The Next Frontier

For organizations that want Strider’s intelligence inside the tools they already use, Strider is building toward open integration standards like MCP (Model Context Protocol) that will allow AI models to connect directly to Strider’s strategic intelligence. The underlying data stays the same: validated, source-backed, and governed by the same methodology regardless of where the intelligence is accessed.

The launch of Strider OS establishes the foundation for a new generation of AI-native capabilities and applications, expanding Strider’s ability to support a broad range of economic security use cases across global industry, government, and academia. But the need for it will only grow. The volume of data organizations face shows no sign of slowing, and adversarial nation-states are growing more sophisticated by the day. Legacy systems and human analysis alone cannot close the widening gap between information and understanding. By fusing open-source intelligence with agentic AI to deliver a shared operating picture at the speed this moment demands, Strider OS is defining the next frontier of strategic intelligence.

Data fragmentation, adversarial nation-states, and how Strider is building the system that enables organizations to navigate the next frontier of strategic intelligence

In a world defined by the abundance of data, the scarcest resource has become clarity.

More data has been created in the last three years than in all of prior history combined, driven largely by advances in technology like artificial intelligence. Yet, insights remain scattered across domains. Information stays siloed within systems. Critical decisions are still being made from incomplete pictures, even as the raw material to complete them sits in plain sight.

This is the central intelligence challenge of our time: connecting fragmented data and translating it into actionable information in real-time. The same technologies driving this explosion of data have also given us the tools to make sense of it. Now what’s needed is an intelligence model grounded in openness, networked collaboration, and machine-speed cognition.

The Intelligence Paradox: More Data, Less Clarity

The intelligence model that carried nations through the last century was built around a simple premise: information was scarce and the side that could find it first won. Back then, the biggest challenge was collection. Intelligence apparatuses relied on information gathered through human sources (HUMINT) and electronic signals and systems (SIGINT). The side with the best spies, deepest networks, and most classified insights held the advantage. Today, that problem has inverted.

Most of the world’s data is now being created in the public domain through the mass digitization of public records, social and news media, and AI. As a result, the challenge has shifted from collection to connection. With so much information already in the open, the advantage belongs to whoever can synthesize it fastest and act with precision.

The Public-Private Divide

Traditionally, governments and the private sector have held different halves of the same intelligence map. Governments see threats through classified intelligence about foreign actors, strategic intent, and geopolitical context. The private sector sees terrain: real-time data about supply chains, innovation networks, talent flows, and operational risks. The seam between them has become one of the most consequential vulnerabilities for democratic security in a digitally networked world.

This divide has real operational consequences. Consider how sanctions work. Governments regularly sanction foreign organizations, removing their ability to conduct commerce with domestic entities. But without visibility into how sanctioned entities and their affiliates adapt—shifting ownership structures, spinning up new front companies, rerouting capital—the action is rendered largely meaningless. It’s a real-life game of Whac-A-Mole: you think you address the threat, yet it reappears under a different identity. The same dynamic plays out across export controls, investment screening, and supply chain security.

The private sector faces an equally critical gap. The bulk of the talent, technology, intellectual property, and supply chains that power democratic economies exists outside government. This makes private sector entities prime targets for adversarial nation-states executing whole-of-society campaigns to capture these assets. Yet without the strategic context that governments hold, most are navigating those threats blind.

Democracies must adopt a new economic security model by fusing collaboration and intelligence sharing across public and private domains. The competitive advantage will not come from matching the secrecy of authoritarian regimes—it will come from mastering openness.

A New Intelligence Model

The world is entering the Intelligence Age, in which power is determined by who can see clearly, decide quickly, and act with precision.

Building an intelligence model equal to this moment requires a fundamentally new approach—one built not on secrecy and silos, but on collaboration and connection. One that fosters deep cooperation between the traditional intelligence community and private-sector innovators. One that leverages cutting-edge technology and intelligence capabilities to defend against threats and ensure continued leadership in science, technology, and global security.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) should sit at the center of this new model.

But data alone does not create insight—structure does. When powered by agentic AI that can plan, collect, and synthesize information at scale, OSINT becomes a dynamic foundation for modern intelligence. Analytical methodologies, combined with AI-driven analysis and human judgment, transform disparate signals into strategic intelligence. These frameworks clarify how nation-state actors acquire technology, move capital, recruit talent, and exploit the seams of open societies, turning complexity into context and information into decision-ready insight.

This structured approach, however, cannot operate in isolation. No single institution can see the full picture alone. But a federated system—where each entity contributes to and benefits from a shared operating picture—can. This is the other essential component of any new model: an architecture that enables trusted data exchange and AI-driven synthesis between public and private networks, bridging national security insight with economic reality.

This should be the new intelligence philosophy: connection, not classification—gaining insight from integration rather than isolation.

The System Strider Built

Strider has built the system that enables organizations to navigate the next frontier of strategic intelligence.

Strider OS is an agentic AI-native system designed to continuously ingest, process, and synthesize unstructured global data into structured outputs. In other words, an agentic data refinery. We take the fragmented, multilingual, and constantly shifting data that defines the modern risk environment and turn it into something organizations can leverage to make faster, more confident decisions. The system resolves identities across sources, maps relationships across jurisdictions, and surfaces what is relevant based on the context of the decision at hand.

Analysis that used to require weeks of skilled human effort can now be maintained as a live picture that reflects the world at the moment a decision needs to be made. The goal is clarity at the moment of decision: what matters, why it matters, and what to do next.

What This Means for Democratic Societies

The global competition for data dominance is one of the defining battles of the 21^st century. The ability to collect, process, and control vast amounts of data is now critical to economic and geopolitical power. This dynamic changes everything—how organizations investigate risk, how governments analyze and share intelligence, and how societies understand the forces shaping security, innovation, and influence.

Meeting this moment demands an all-of-society approach to intelligence. That means governments, industry, and academic institutions must operate not as separate actors, but as nodes in a shared intelligence network.  They must come together to protect the talent being recruited, the technology being acquired, the intellectual property being stolen, and the supply chains being compromised.

The intelligence model for this moment must be built on data, accelerated by AI, and strengthened through collaboration across public and private domains. It will require governments and industry to master openness and finally operate from a shared picture—contributing to and benefiting from a common understanding of the landscape.

By aligning the vastness of OSINT, the speed of AI, the creativity of the private sector, and the authority of government, we can outthink and outpace closed regimes.

That is the frontier of strategic intelligence.

How the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Plans to Leverage Artificial Intelligence to Remain Competitive

NOTE: This is the second post in Strider’s series on the PRC’s 15^th Five-Year Plan (FYP). The first post provided an overview of the 15^th FYP’s major themes. This post examines the AI+ Action Plan in greater detail.

On March 13, 2026, China adopted the 15^th Five-Year Plan (FYP) for National Economic and Social Development. Among its most consequential priorities is artificial intelligence, which the 15^th FYP frames as a sweeping imperative touching every dimension of the PRC’s economy, governance, and society.

The AI+ Action Plan (AI+), first announced in 2024 and included as part of the 15^th FYP, is Beijing’s clearest statement to date on how it intends to develop artificial intelligence to reshape the competitive landscape. For foreign organizations across sectors, understanding what AI+ explicitly directs and where the risks are most concentrated is essential.

AI+ spans six domains: science and technology, industrial development, consumption, public services, governance, and international cooperation. Each domain carries its own set of directives, but the underlying logic is consistent: embed AI deeply and deliberately, from laboratory research and factory floors to healthcare, education, and security. Together, they represent the PRC’s most comprehensive attempt yet to make AI a foundational element of how the country operates and competes.

Building the Foundation

The PRC is prioritizing the development of a national AI foundation built on computing infrastructure, advanced algorithms, and large-scale data. In parallel, the 15^th FYP calls for strengthening capabilities in advanced chips, optoelectronic components, and industrial software—the hardware layer underpinning AI development and the primary focus of Western export controls.

The push to build this AI foundation reflects Beijing’s longstanding effort to reduce external dependence—one that has only intensified as geopolitical tensions deepened through the 14^th FYP period. Supply chain disruptions and tightening technology restrictions reinforced what PRC officials had already identified as a structural vulnerability. The 15^th FYP sharpens that emphasis, structuring development to operate under and adapt to those constraints as a baseline condition.

Science and Industry

In science and technology, AI+ calls for accelerating AI-driven research paradigms and technology innovation models. This includes building intelligent research platforms, assembling high-quality scientific datasets, and strengthening cross-disciplinary collaboration between AI and adjacent fields, including quantum science, life sciences, advanced materials, new energy, and 6G. The objective is to reshape how research is conducted—using AI to accelerate discovery, compress development timelines, and reduce reliance on foreign expertise and institutions.

On the industrial side, AI+ calls for embedding AI across the full spectrum of business activities, from manufacturing or service delivery to operations (distribution, human resources, marketing, and more). Energy is an explicit priority, with AI-driven innovation targeted at power system management, energy exploration, and renewable energy forecasting. Agriculture is another, with applications in bio-breeding, production management, and disease prevention. AI+ also targets service sectors, calling for expanded AI agents and intelligent terminals across software and IT services, finance, transportation, and logistics.

Society and Consumption

In public services, AI+ targets two sectors with specificity: education and healthcare. AI-powered learning companions, teaching assistants, and personalized learning tools are all mentioned, with the aim of building a new model for how instruction is delivered. The focus on education also reflects a longer-term goal of the PRC: using AI to elevate talent across the population, expanding access to quality instruction and building a more capable workforce at scale. In healthcare, the focus is on expanding AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment into primary care institutions, extending capabilities beyond major urban hospitals to the broader population. Across both sectors, the deeper aim is to reshape how essential services are delivered and prepare the country for a future in which AI is central to both.

The consumption side reflects a different ambition. AI+ calls for developing AI-native applications, promoting next-generation intelligent devices, and expanding consumer use cases through AI experience centers. These directives are aimed at embedding AI into daily life in ways that shape consumer expectations, drive domestic demand, and create new markets for PRC technology companies.

Governance and Global Reach

Domestically, AI+ expands AI into core state functions, including market regulation, workplace safety, public security, cyberspace governance, and environmental protection. It also calls for developing frameworks to manage not only people, but the AI systems operating alongside them. With new AI-generated virtual personas and intelligent robots, the PRC is building the infrastructure for AI-enabled governance. The PRC will likely seek to establish the AI governance models it develops as the global standard for AI regulation.

The PRC’s international ambitions outlined in AI+ are equally significant. It calls for establishing a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, developing multilateral AI cooperation platforms under the Belt and Road Initiative, and establishing an International AI Application Cooperation Center. AI+ also emphasizes joint development of AI regulatory frameworks, technical standards, and ethical guidelines, alongside a globally open AI open-source ecosystem and developer community. Together, these initiatives create structured channels through which the PRC can engage with foreign institutions, technologies, and talent on its own terms.

What This Means for Foreign Organizations

The AI+ Action Plan is a blueprint for system-wide transformation at national scale. For foreign organizations, these ambitions translate into tangible and growing risks that extend beyond the technology sector itself.

The competition for talent will intensify. As the PRC scales its AI-enabled industrial ecosystems, demand for advanced technical expertise will continue to outpace domestic supply. The 15^th FYP’s emphasis on attracting high-end talent, combined with programs like the “New Thousand Talents Program” targeting scientists in AI, information technology, synthetic biology, and advanced materials, means that foreign research institutions and technology companies will face more coordinated, better resourced, and sustained recruitment pressure over the next five years.

IP exposure will increase. Embedding AI across the full industrial chain means that the PRC is building data assets, training models, and developing capabilities across sectors where foreign organizations have built competitive advantage over decades. Joint ventures, research collaborations, and open-source code contributions are a few examples of pathways state actors can leverage to gain access for unfair advantage—many times without detection.

The standards race is underway. The PRC’s push to shape international AI regulatory frameworks, technical standards, and ethical guidelines is a strategic effort to shape the global order to favor its systems, supply chains, and governance models. As these standards spread globally, they could give PRC firms a lasting competitive edge while making it harder for foreign competitors to enter the market.

Conclusion

The 15^th Five-Year Plan’s AI+ Action Plan is one of the most expansive AI integration directives adopted by any government to date. It reaches into science, industry, consumption, governance, and global cooperation simultaneously, and is backed by the full weight of the PRC’s central planning system. Implementation will unfold over years, but the pressure it will generate on foreign organizations is already taking shape.

The next post in this series will examine the 15^th FYP’s talent agenda—specifically how the PRC’s global recruitment push is being reorganized, rebranded, and scaled—and what that means in the competition for advanced-technology expertise.

How the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Is Preparing for the Next Era of Global Competition

NOTE: This overview is the first in a series of deeper dives into the 15^th Five-Year Plan’s most consequential themes.

The PRC recently adopted its 15^th Five-Year Plan (FYP), outlining an ambitious set of national economic and social development priorities for the next five years.

For decades, the PRC’s “five-year plans” have served as its central governance instrument—translating leadership priorities into coordinated action across industry, technology, and society. The 15^th FYP follows that established model, but reflects a more complex strategic environment, shaped by domestic economic pressures, heightened geopolitical tensions, evolving global trade dynamics, and intensifying technological competition.

To understand how the PRC’s five-year plans function—and how their outcomes are evaluated—the 14^th FYP provides the most relevant baseline.

14^th Five-Year Plan Recap

The 14^th FYP (2021–2025) was tasked with delivering both growth and some structural reform, and by most official indicators it did. The PRC’s economy expanded at an average annual rate of roughly 5.5% over the first four years, contributing around 30% of global growth annually. At the same time, R&D investment rose nearly 50% compared to the previous plan period, supporting visible advances across sectors—from the C919 commercial aircraft and the Chang’e-6 lunar mission, to large language models and globally competitive new energy vehicles.

However, the Plan also exposed PRC vulnerabilities. Export controls, supply chain disruptions, and escalating trade tensions highlighted the limits of external dependence. Talent gaps in the digital economy widened, while the transition from investment-led to innovation-driven growth remained incomplete. The 15^th FYP is, in part, a response to these constraints.

15^th Five-Year Plan Process

The 15^th FYP was developed through a structured, multi-year process led by the central authorities and coordinated across multiple levels of government. Preliminary research, led by the National Development and Reform Commission, began in December 2023 and included early assessments of 14^th FYP implementation. By mid-2024, President Xi Jinping called for comprehensive preparations, emphasizing the need for rigorous evaluation and forward-looking planning.

In January 2025, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership established a central drafting group headed by Xi. The group convened its first plenary session in February 2025, marking the official start of the drafting phase. Six central research teams were subsequently deployed across 12 provincial-level regions to collect local input. During this period, Xi conducted multiple field visits to companies and communities, including engagements with advanced technology sectors such as the large-model AI incubator in Shanghai.

The draft plan was submitted to the fourth plenary session of the 20^th CCP Central Committee, held in October 2025, where it was deliberated and adopted. Final approval was granted by the National People’s Congress in March 2026, completing the formal policy cycle.

15^th Five-Year Plan Overview

The 15^th FYP builds on priorities established under the 14^th FYP, with a clearer emphasis on resilience, industrial upgrading, and technological self-reliance. Rather than prioritizing growth alone, the Plan positions high-quality development, real-economy strengthening, domestic demand, continued “opening-up,” and national security as mutually reinforcing pillars of the PRC’s next stage of development.

AI: A National Imperative

The 15^th FYP’s “AI+ Action Plan” reflects Beijing’s intent to embed AI across every dimension of the PRC’s economy and society—from scientific research and industrial production to public services, governance, and daily life. The Plan builds a national AI foundation anchored in computing infrastructure, advanced algorithms, and large-scale data resources, while driving integration across critical sectors including energy, advanced manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare. Beyond domestic deployment, the Plan advances a global agenda—promoting a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, multilateral AI partnerships under the Belt and Road Initiative, and a globally open AI open-source ecosystem. As Beijing consolidates its core technological capabilities and competes for high-end talent, foreign organizations face elevated risks of talent competition, IP exposure, and the erosion of technological advantage.

Talent: The Defining Challenge

As the PRC scales its technological and industrial ambitions under the 15^th FYP, demand for advanced-technology expertise will continue to outpace supply. The Plan responds with a state-led “world-class talent engine” designed to attract leading experts in priority technologies by offering autonomy, globally competitive pay, and optimal research conditions. A separate proposal calls for Beijing municipality to launch a “New Thousand Talents Program” to recruit 1,000 top scientists—primarily from the U.S. and Europe—in sectors including AI, information technology, synthetic biology, and advanced materials. At the regional level, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Guangdong are each advancing locally tailored approaches—from dual-appointment recruitment models to non-traditional roles like “science vice presidents”—to embed talent acquisition within broader innovation ecosystems. As these efforts continue to scale, persistent workforce gaps will intensify external sourcing and heighten global competition for advanced technology talent over the next five years.

Industry: Building from Within

The 15^th FYP also prioritizes building a modernized industrial system along two parallel tracks. The first focuses on upgrading traditional industries—steel, petrochemicals, shipbuilding, and electronics—pushing production toward higher-value, supply-scarce products that have historically depended on foreign suppliers. The second targets emerging industries—integrated circuits, embodied AI, bio-manufacturing, commercial aviation, and brain-computer interfaces—positioning them as new drivers of economic growth. Together, these two tracks reflect the Plan’s broader ambition to build an industrial base that is, in the Plan’s own words, “more self-supporting and risk-resilient” and capable of withstanding the kind of external pressure and supply chain disruption that has defined the past five years.

Conclusion

Our next post will examine the PRC’s AI ambitions in greater detail—what the AI+ agenda means in practice and where the risks for foreign organizations are most acute. From there, the series will turn to talent, exploring how the PRC’s recruitment push is reshaping global competition for advanced-technology expertise. Another post will take a closer look at the PRC’s industrial strategy—what it means for supply chains, emerging sectors, and the organizations that depend on them.

How Amended Rules Increase Risk for Foreign Companies and Their Employees Operating in Hong Kong

On March 23, 2026, the Hong Kong government, under pressure from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), changed the implementing rules of its National Security Law in ways that should put every company that does business in, or transits through, Hong Kong on alert. Refusing to hand over passwords or provide decryption assistance to Hong Kong police is now a criminal offense—and that applies to everyone: residents, visitors, and anyone transiting Hong Kong International Airport, including U.S. citizens. Hong Kong authorities also gained expanded powers to seize and retain personal devices as evidence in national security cases.

The rule change is the latest development in a trend Strider analysts have been tracking since Hong Kong’s Article 23 passed in 2024—a steady, deliberate convergence of Hong Kong’s legal and intelligence environment with that of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). For foreign companies that have continued operating in the city without adjusting their posture, the risk is no longer theoretical.

A Law with Broad Reach

In June 2020, the PRC National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) unanimously passed the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,” bypassing Hong Kong’s own legislature entirely to impose a national security law directly on the city, criminalizing secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces.

Hong Kong’s Legislative Council passed Article 23 in March 2024, also known as the “Safeguarding National Security Bill,” to quell “political crimes,” including theft of state secrets and espionage. Article 23 defines “state secrets” to include any information related to a “major policy decision” or to economic, social, technological, or scientific developments—even if that information has never been officially classified. Acts of “espionage” under the law include providing “useful” information to an “external force” or colluding with such a force to publish false or misleading statements.

Like their counterparts in Mainland China, Hong Kong residents are now legally compelled to inform authorities when they suspect someone of committing an infraction. The two laws now operate in tandem, giving the PRC a comprehensive legal architecture to govern national security in Hong Kong on its own terms.

In 2024, the PRC revised its Law on Guarding State Secrets to prevent the leaking of information that could harm the CCP or benefit foreign countries or businesses. In 2023, Beijing amended its counter-espionage law to characterize information collection related to national security or national interests as an act of espionage.

The U.S. State Department expressed “deep concern” over Article 23, noting that it carries “broad implications” for Hong Kong residents as well as U.S. citizens and companies. Officials also warned that Hong Kong authorities could seek to apply the law extraterritorially.

Industries Most at Risk

Companies engaged in due diligence, business intelligence, or economic and market research face the greatest exposure. Hong Kong authorities could characterize these activities as “intelligence work” targeting “state secrets.” The PRC has already used its national security framework, the same framework that shaped Article 23, to clamp down on foreign consulting and due diligence businesses conducting investment screening, forensic accounting, or background checks.

The risks also extend to personnel. PRC intelligence services (PRCIS), including the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Ministry of Public Security (MPS), have long operated in Hong Kong to monitor the local population and target foreign nationals. The PRCIS employs a wide range of collection methods: front organizations operating under commercial or academic cover, advanced technical surveillance, co-opted locals across service industries, targeted online outreach via professional networking platforms, and offers of paid travel or financial remuneration. Employees traveling to Hong Kong should assume that all electronic devices and communications are subject to monitoring.

The intelligence apparatus in Hong Kong also prioritizes access over ethnicity. While the PRCIS can leverage familial or cultural ties to the PRC, its primary objective is identifying any individual willing to provide information of value—regardless of background. Anyone with access to sensitive data, advanced research, or government-connected networks is a potential target.

Historical cases illustrate the point: In 2022, a former U.S. Army pilot and cleared U.S. defense contractor was sentenced to prison. Over two years, he traveled multiple times to Hong Kong to meet with PRCIS handlers, passing sensitive aviation-related material in exchange for payment. In a separate 2024 incident, a U.S. Army sergeant was charged with leaking classified information on advanced weapons systems to a foreign national claiming to live in Hong Kong, receiving a series of payments that increased as the sensitivity of the material grew.

What Companies Should Do

As Beijing tightens its control over Hong Kong, these risks will only deepen. Following Article 23’s passage, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee announced that the city would “actively integrate” into the PRC’s “overall development” and “strengthen the flow of people, logistics, capital, and information.” The head of the German Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong acknowledged that company executives would find it increasingly difficult to distinguish the city from the rest of the PRC.

Foreign companies operating in Hong Kong can take concrete steps to manage their exposure.

Update Policies and Procedures. The law’s deliberately vague language gives authorities wide latitude to target groups and individuals perceived as a threat to stability—whether they are doing business in or transiting through Hong Kong. Organizations should review Hong Kong-based operations and reevaluate activities that could be conflated with criminal conduct under the new framework.

Educate and Empower Personnel. Briefing leadership and staff on the risks associated with information gathering and sharing in Hong Kong can drive more cautious behavior. Engaging with groups or individuals critical of Beijing or the Hong Kong government—even casually—could raise an organization’s profile and invite scrutiny by security agencies.

Conduct Thorough Due Diligence. Vetting Hong Kong-based organizations and individuals, with particular attention to their ties to Beijing, is essential. Monitoring Western sanctions lists is a baseline requirement for remaining compliant and avoiding relationships that expose technology, talent, and supply chains to unnecessary risk.

The Intelligence Dimension

Strider helps organizations understand and manage state-sponsored risks in environments like Hong Kong, where the line between commercial activity and legal liability has become dangerously thin. Tools like People Search and Insights help identify individuals’ ties to state-sponsored programs or entities, while Organizations Search enables organizations to assess third-party partners for connections to state-directed actors. Shield helps protect intellectual property by identifying higher-risk indicators associated with state-linked recruitment and technology transfer activity. Within its Intelligence Center, Strider analysts provide ongoing coverage of legislative, institutional, and operational developments that affect how organizations must think about their exposure in complex geopolitical environments.

Hong Kong’s newly amended rules of its National Security Law represent a meaningful shift in the risk calculus for foreign companies. The legal exposure, the intelligence threat, and the erosion of institutional independence demand immediate attention from any organization operating in or connected to Hong Kong.

The companies best positioned to navigate this environment will be those that treat it with the seriousness it demands—understanding the law, preparing their people, and building the intelligence capabilities needed to stay ahead.

From the systems that power electrical grids to the communications networks that connect the world, critical infrastructure is the foundation of economic growth and resiliency, national security, public safety, and life as we know it. It is a sprawling web of interdependent systems operating at extraordinary scale—divided by sector, but united by shared technologies, intertwined supply chains, and, increasingly, collective vulnerabilities.

While governments around the world maintain their own definitions of “critical infrastructure,” they largely converge around the same core systems that underpin modern society. Terminology may differ, but critical infrastructure sectors broadly include communications, information technology, and digital infrastructure systems; major energy sources (including electricity, renewables, oil, and gas); financial services and banking; government services and facilities; transportation systems (including air, rail, and maritime); water and wastewater; and defense. These are the sectors that societies rely on—making them uniquely attractive targets.

Adversarial nation-states like the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, and Iran have spent the past decade mapping vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure—learning about them, figuring out how best to exploit them, and infiltrating them. The threat these countries now pose is more coordinated, more persistent, and more strategically targeted than at any prior point in history.

Critical infrastructure systems have become the new terrain through which power is projected and pressure is applied.

The Threat Landscape Has Changed

For organizations in critical infrastructure sectors, reliability has always been a top priority: keeping the power flowing, networks connected, goods moving, and daily life running. That hasn’t changed. But the threat landscape these organizations are operating in has. Today, resilience against adversarial nation-states has become as important as the reliability these systems have always prioritized.

That resilience is already being tested worldwide. Foreign-manufactured components with opaque capabilities have been discovered in Western power grids. Major telecommunications carriers have identified state-linked actors operating within their core networks. Energy and industrial companies in North America and Europe have taken systems offline following attacks that moved through third-party partners and global supply chains. The methods of intrusion are varied, but the scale and coordination point to something more deliberate than opportunistic attacks.

What distinguishes this new landscape is the strategy behind it. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have assessed with high confidence that recent activity by groups like Volt Typhoon, a PRC state-sponsored hacking group known to target critical infrastructure, is inconsistent with traditional cyber espionage. Meanwhile, Russian-backed groups have targeted power grids, government networks, and financial institutions in Europe, aiming to destabilize and erode public trust. And Iran has gone after critical sectors in both the U.S. and Europe—including healthcare, transportation, and oil and gas—to test vulnerabilities.

These actors are not just trying to steal data. They are pre-positioning themselves deep inside critical systems with the goal of being able to cause disruption on demand. The objective is leverage, and critical infrastructure is how they intend to get it.

Policymakers have taken notice and are taking action. Japan’s Economic Security Promotion Act, enacted in 2022, designated approximately 200 entities across 15 sectors as critical infrastructure operators. The government is enabled to vet equipment suppliers or maintainers to ensure that vulnerabilities aren’t introduced related to foreign entities of concern.

In the United States, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed that PRC state-sponsored actors had compromised networks across communications, energy, transportation, and water system sectors. Previously, the U.S. banned PRC technology provider Huawei from its 5G and telecommunications networks due to espionage risks.

In its National Security Strategy 2025, the UK government stated that “Hostile activity on British soil from countries like Russia and Iran is increasing, threatening our people, critical national infrastructure and prosperity.” The UK government also pledged to “roll out a series of new measures to…enhance the resilience of our critical national infrastructure.

The European Union, meanwhile, recently moved to restrict PRC suppliers from critical infrastructure, such as telecommunication networks, across member states entirely.

These actions make clear that critical infrastructure is a prime target for adversaries. For those responsible for keeping these systems safe and secure, understanding where and how deeply they have already been reached—and the strategies being employed by adversarial nation-states—has become essential for safeguarding economies and societies.

Where Critical Infrastructure Is Most Exposed

Understanding where adversaries are finding their way in starts with understanding how exposure accumulates—and it rarely happens the way most organizations expect. It comes through procurement decisions made without full visibility, hires that passed every background check, and partnerships that looked clean on paper. For organizations across critical infrastructure sectors, the risk concentrates in three places.

The first is the supply chain. The global supply chain for critical infrastructure components is vast, layered, and can often be difficult to trace. While that complexity is a byproduct of operating at global scale and within intertwined economies, it is also one of the most consequential vulnerabilities that organizations face. Adversaries have spent years learning to exploit it. The result has been solar inverters with undisclosed communication capabilities; telecommunications hardware sourced from entities with government ties; and transformers, fiber optic cables, and industrial control components whose origins cannot be verified.

Strider’s “In Broad Daylight” report captured exactly what that exploitation looks like in practice. In November 2024, PRC-linked company Deye remotely disabled inverters across the United States, United Kingdom, and Puerto Rico following a commercial dispute. The capability had been embedded in the hardware before it ever reached the grid. The leverage was already in place. The dispute simply revealed it. Strider research also shed light on the sustained PRC effort to identify vulnerabilities and develop methods to disrupt Western power grids—uncovering 2,723 publications on the subject authored by researchers affiliated with PRC defense institutions, including the People’s Liberation Army and national defense universities.

The second is the workforce. Privileged access to critical infrastructure systems is among the most valuable things an adversary can acquire—and state-sponsored actors are pursuing it methodically through recruitment, cultivation, and talent pipelines that look entirely legitimate from the outside. In 2023, that reality came into sharp focus when a telecom contractor in Florida was charged with acting as an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security while maintaining active system access at a major U.S. carrier. For every case like this that surfaces, the harder question is how many have not. Any organization that relies solely on conventional vetting methods is likely carrying risk that has not yet been illuminated.

The third is the extended partner ecosystem. Every joint venture, contractor relationship, and operational partnership is a potential entry point for adversaries to exploit. Partners bring their own supply chains, personnel, and geopolitical entanglements into shared operational environments, and there is rarely visibility into the full ecosystem. In the oil and gas sectors, where global operations and joint ventures are common, adversaries actively seek out partnerships as digital access points to disrupt operations and gain strategic advantage. Intellectual property from exploration breakthroughs, refining processes, and material-science research are frequent targets—compromised through the same trusted partnerships that companies depend on to operate. When any part of that ecosystem is compromised, the entire organization is compromised with it.

A Strider Use Case: A Major Energy Provider Prevented Exposure

A prominent U.S. power and energy company servicing some of the largest metropolitan areas in the country wanted to ensure its critical systems were safeguarded from nation-state threats. Company leaders wanted full visibility into the entities within its ecosystem as third-party partners or technology providers.

The company used Strider’s strategic intelligence platform to identify all entities with technology embedded in its infrastructure, then screened every third-party partner involved in day-to-day operations for connections to foreign entities of concern. What they found was alarming. A substantial portion of their critical infrastructure was being managed by a third-party company with direct connections to the PRC government, military, and defense organizations. The relationship posed a serious risk: this energy company could potentially lose operational control of their critical systems to a PRC government entity or actors working on its behalf. Company leaders severed ties with the management company.

For organizations involved in critical infrastructure sectors, this case illustrates something important: the exposure existed before anyone went looking for it. It only became visible when they had the right tools to see it.

How Strider Helps Critical Infrastructure Organizations

The organizations that manage risk posed by adversarial nation-states best are the ones that can see it clearly across their supply chains, their workforce, and their extended partner ecosystem. Most organizations have invested heavily in tools designed to detect threats after they’ve entered their critical systems. Strider’s strategic intelligence enables organizations to get ahead of these threats.

For supply chain and partner risk, Organizations Search maps the full ownership and affiliation picture behind every vendor, supplier, component, joint venture partner, and major contractor embedded in an operational environment—uncovering multi-tier relationships, hidden parent companies, and state-linked intermediaries.

For workforce risk, People Search screens employees, contractors, and candidates for nation-state ties, falsified credentials, and risky affiliations—revealing hidden connections that conventional background checks were never built to detect.

Across all three, Insights tracks the specific technologies and subject-matter experts most likely to be targeted by state actors and generates reporting for leadership on emerging geopolitical and partner risks.

And Shield flags and blocks malicious domains, emails, and communications tied to known adversary campaigns—feeding high-risk indicators into existing security systems to monitor risky inbound and outbound activity before it reaches operational environments.

Strider also provides expert analysis within its Intelligence Center on critical infrastructure security—offering additional context on state-sponsored recruitment initiatives and efforts to identify and exploit vulnerabilities.

The systems that make up critical infrastructure are only as resilient as the technologies, supply chains, and people that support them. Strider gives organizations the visibility to understand that full picture and to act on it before someone else does.

Conclusion

Critical infrastructure is the foundation that modern society cannot function without. And precisely because of that, it has become a primary target for those seeking leverage in this new geopolitical era. Keeping it secure, reliable, and free from foreign interference requires a level of vigilance that many organizations have not yet applied—but must.

Those who act now will find the exposure. Those who wait will feel it.