 | |
Native name | 云从科技集团股份有限公司 |
|---|---|
| Company type | Public |
| Industry | Facial recognition |
| Founded | 27 March 2015 |
| Founder | Zhou Xi |
| Headquarters | Guangzhou, Guangdong, China |
| Website | www |
CloudWalk Technology Co. Ltd. is a Chinese developer of facial recognition software. [1]
The company has been sanctioned by the United States government for allegedly participating in major human rights abuses against Uyghurs. [2] [3] [4]
CloudWalk was founded by Zhou Xi, a graduate of the University of Science and Technology of China with an academic background in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. [5] CloudWalk was founded in April 2015, following Zhou's departure from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. [5]
CloudWalk's initial funding came from the Guangzhou municipal government in 2017. [6] : 13 The same year, CloudWalk raised $379 million in Series B funding from investors including Shunwei Capital, Oriza Holdings, and Puhua Capital. [7] In 2018, CloudWalk signed an agreement with the government of Zimbabwe to create a national facial-recognition database and monitoring system. [8]
Cloudwalk recorded an aggregate net loss of US$398 million from 2018 to 2020. Other than the company's financial state, the company also dealt with regulations relating to personal data, preventing it from publicly listing its shares. In 2021, its initial public offering (IPO) application was accepted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange. [9] In May 2022, the company floated some of its shares publicly on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. However, the initial public offering price was lower than what was originally anticipated which was slashed by 29 percent from the pre-IPO valuation. [10]
In May 2023, CloudWalk released their large language model, Comfort, for beta testing. [11]
On May 22, 2020, the United States Department of Commerce added CloudWalk Technology to its Entity List for its role in aiding the Chinese government in the mass surveillance of the Uyghur population. CloudWalk Technology partnered with the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to develop the surveillance technology. [12] According to U.S. officials, CloudWalk Technology was "complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR)". [13] In December 2021, the United States Department of the Treasury prohibited all U.S. investment in Cloudwalk Technology, accusing the company of complicity in aiding the Uyghur genocide. [4]
In October 2022, the United States Department of Defense added CloudWalk to a list of "Chinese military companies" operating in the U.S. [14]
CloudWalk is the primary supplier of facial recognition technology to the Bank of China and Haitong Securities. [5]
In 2018, CloudWalk signed a deal to provide the government of Zimbabwe with a mass facial recognition system, which will monitor all major transportation hubs, as well as create a national facial ID database. [15] [16]
The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, also known as Bingtuan, trading with the external name China Xinjiang Group, is a state-owned enterprise and paramilitary organization in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Ltd., often shortened to Hikvision, is a Chinese state-owned manufacturer and supplier of video surveillance equipment for civilian and military purposes, headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Due to its alleged involvement in mass surveillance of Uyghurs, the Xinjiang internment camps, and national security concerns, the company has been placed under sanctions from the U.S. and European governments.
The Xinjiang conflict, also known as the East Turkistan conflict, Uyghur–Chinese conflict or Sino-East Turkistan conflict, is an ethnic geopolitical conflict in what is now China's far-northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, also known as East Turkistan. It is centred around the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group who constitute a plurality of the region's population.
Mass surveillance in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is the network of monitoring systems used by the Chinese central government to monitor Chinese citizens. It is primarily conducted through the government, although corporate surveillance in connection with the Chinese government has been reported to occur. China monitors its citizens through Internet surveillance, camera surveillance, and through other digital technologies. It has become increasingly widespread and grown in sophistication under General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Xi Jinping's administration.
Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co., Ltd. is a publicly traded company based in Binjiang District, Hangzhou, which manufactures video surveillance equipment. A minority of Dahua is state-owned.
SenseTime is a partly state-owned publicly traded artificial intelligence company headquartered in Hong Kong. The company develops technologies including facial recognition, image recognition, object detection, optical character recognition, medical image analysis, video analysis, autonomous driving, and remote sensing. Since 2019, SenseTime has been repeatedly sanctioned by the U.S. government due to allegations that its facial recognition technology has been deployed in the surveillance and internment of the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities. SenseTime denies the allegations.
The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called vocational education and training centers by the government of China, are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror", a policy announced in 2014. 37 countries have expressed support for China's government for "counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures", including countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Venezuela; meanwhile 22 or 43 countries, depending on source, have called on China to respect the human rights of the Uyghur community, including countries such as Canada, Germany, Turkey and Japan. Xinjiang internment camps have been described as "the most extreme example of China's inhumane policies against Uighurs". The camps have been criticized by the subcommittee of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development for persecution of Uyghurs in China, including mistreatment, rape, torture, and genocide.
In May 2014, the Government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched the "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" in the far west province of Xinjiang. It is an aspect of the Xinjiang conflict, the ongoing struggle by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government to manage the ethnically diverse and tumultuous province. According to critics, the CCP and the Chinese government have used the global "war on terrorism" of the 2000s to frame separatist and ethnic unrest as acts of Islamist terrorism to legitimize its counter-insurgency policies in Xinjiang. Chinese officials have maintained that the campaign is essential for national security purposes.
Megvii is a Chinese technology company that designs image recognition and deep-learning software. Based in Beijing, the company develops artificial intelligence (AI) technology for businesses and for the public sector.
The Xinjiang papers are a collection of more than 400 pages of internal Chinese government documents describing the government policy regarding Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region. In November 2019, journalists Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley at The New York Times broke the story that characterized the documents as "one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China's ruling Communist Party in decades." According to The New York Times, the documents were leaked by a source inside the Chinese Communist Party and include a breakdown of how China created and organized the Xinjiang internment camps.
Since 2014, the Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide. There have been reports of mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights.
The China Cables are a collection of secret Chinese government documents from 2017 which were leaked by exiled Uyghurs to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and published on 24 November 2019. The documents include a telegram which details the first known operations manual for running the Xinjiang internment camps, and bulletins which illustrate how China's centralized data collection system and mass surveillance tool, known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, uses artificial intelligence to identify people for interrogation and potential detention.
Adrian Nikolaus Zenz is a German anthropologist known for his studies of the Xinjiang internment camps and persecution of Uyghurs in China. He is a director and senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist think tank established by the US government and based in Washington, DC.
Rushan Abbas is a Uyghur American activist and advocate from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. She is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs and was elected the Chairperson of the Executive Committee of World Uyghur Congress on October 26th, 2024. Abbas became one of the most prominent Uyghur voices in international activism following her sister's detainment by the Chinese government in 2018.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is a United States federal law that changed U.S. policy on China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region with the goal of ensuring that American entities are not funding forced labor among ethnic minorities in the region. It was signed into law in December 2021 and took effect in June 2022.
The Uyghur Tribunal was an independent "people's tribunal" based in the United Kingdom aiming to examine evidence regarding the ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghur people by the Government of China and to evaluate whether the abuses constitute genocide under the Genocide Convention. The tribunal was chaired by Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milošević, who announced the creation of the tribunal in September 2020.
Rayhan Asat is a Uyghur lawyer and human rights advocate. Since 2020, she has led a public campaign for the release of her brother, Ekpar Asat, who has been held in the Xinjiang internment camp system since 2016, and on behalf of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China. In 2021, she joined the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council as a Nonresident Senior Fellow and became a Yale World Fellow. Asat is also a Senior Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and President of the American Turkic International Lawyers Association.
Internet Protocol Video Market (IPVM) is a security and surveillance industry research group and trade publication based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania that focuses on reviewing and reporting on video-surveillance technology.
The OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China is a report published on 31 August 2022 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concerning the treatment of Uyghurs and other largely Muslim groups in China. The report concluded that "[t]he extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity." Human rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet released the report shortly before leaving the office.
Yitu Technology, stylized as YITU, is a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence company that develops facial recognition systems. The company was founded in 2012 by Leo Zhu and Lin Chenxi. Yitu's software, branded as Dragonfly Eye, is used by public security bureaus throughout China to identify individuals and vehicles.
Several Chinese facial recognition start-ups have attracted large fundraising, helped by a government push to make China a world leader in AI. Guangzhou Cloudwalk Technology has recently received about $379 million in Series B funding, while Beijing-based Face++ last month raised $460 million.
According to Cloudwalk's prospectus, the company ran an aggregate net loss of RMB 2.58 billion, or USD 398 million, in the three years from 2018 to 2020. Its financial state, as well as regulatory adjustments related to personal data, may be obstacles on the road to going public.
