Kathleen Waters, a deputy spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to address specific issues with G42. She called the Emirates an “important partner” but said White House officials have made clear to the Emiratis and others the administration’s “strong concerns about the P.R.C. seeking military and intelligence advantages through the acquisition of sensitive U.S. technologies and data, which the Biden administration is determined to protect.” (The P.R.C. is the People’s Republic of China.)
“This will continue to be a focus of intensive engagement with the U.A.E. and many other countries, and we welcome progress to date,” Ms. Waters added.
Yousef Al Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador in Washington, declined to comment.
G42 declined a request for an interview with Mr. Xiao, its chief executive, and did not answer questions about its partnerships with specific Chinese companies or about U.S. government concerns over those. In a statement to The New York Times, Talal Al Kaissi, a senior executive at the company, said the firm had worked “with various international technology players from around the world.” He noted that it began discussions with Microsoft late last year to try to replace its technology stack or infrastructure. This year, he said, it decided to look to U.S. companies, including Cerebras and Nvidia, to upgrade a supercomputer and shift from its “legacy technology supplier, which included Chinese hardware.”
The company ensures operations and licensed technologies “remain in full compliance” with U.S. government regulations and talks to U.S. agencies about staying aligned with those, he said. It is “partnering with leading companies and institutions with shared values and developing responsible A.I. solutions,” he added.
‘The Ultimate Question of Life’
G42’s name is drawn from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the science-fiction series by Douglas Adams, in which the number 42 represents the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.” (The G stands for group.)
“Forty-two is really our mission,” Mr. Xiao said in a promotional video for the company last year. “In that amazing book, 42 was the answer to the meaning of life.”
Within that wide remit, G42 encompasses a $10 billion technology investment fund, an Arabic language A.I. model, a tech talent platform, a health care company, a genome-sequencing program and more. G42’s investments overseas include a $100 million purchase early this year of shares in ByteDance, the Chinese company that is the parent of TikTok, the popular social media app, according to a Bloomberg News report.
In a promotional video, Mr. Xiao said he believed that the impact of artificial intelligence on human civilization would be “much more profound than fire, electricity or even internet.”
In addition to collaborations with Chinese companies, G42 has also signed agreements with American companies including Microsoft and Dell Technologies.
Mr. Xiao has impressed some of his American partners.
“He’s a visionary,” said Andrew Feldman, the chief executive of Cerebras, the Silicon Valley A.I. firm that is partnering with G42 on the supercomputer project. “He’s knowledgeable and thoughtful. I found somebody with a shared vision.”
Besides its work with G42, Cerebras has several U.S. government contracts, including with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Department of Energy, according to public records and Mr. Feldman.
Mr. Feldman said he was surprised to hear about the Biden administration’s concerns about G42 and said that no American officials have raised those concerns with him or other officers at Cerebras.
OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment, and Dell said, “We comply with global regulations and have nothing additional to add.”
Social Media and Genetic Data
Sheikh Tahnoon, the company’s sunglasses-obsessed chairman, is one of the Emirates’ most powerful men. Even in a state where senior officials often hold multiple posts, Sheikh Tahnoon, a brother of the Emirati president, stands out. In addition to overseeing a secretive conglomerate called the “International Holding Company” — the country’s most valuable listed firm — Sheikh Tahnoon is also the deputy ruler of the emirate of Abu Dhabi and head of an $853 billion sovereign wealth fund. (Another family-run sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, has a stake in G42.)
Mr. Xiao has been a part of Sheikh Tahnoon’s ventures for some time, and several of the past partnerships have set off alarms within American spy agencies.
There is very little about Mr. Xiao’s background online, which is rare for a chief executive of a prominent company. His LinkedIn page and corporate profiles say he earned bachelor’s degrees at Hawaii Pacific University and a master’s degree at George Washington University in the 1990s, but there is no information on his years before college.
His LinkedIn account says he worked from 1999 to 2014 as a chief technology officer for MicroStrategy, a technology company in Virginia. He has rarely given individual interviews to journalists but has done some public talks. An online post by China’s embassy in the Emirates that mentions him uses the Chinese name 肖鹏.
Four years ago, a firm led by Mr. Xiao had a hand in the operation of a social media app, ToTok, that American intelligence agencies identified as a spy tool that the Emirati government was using to track the movements and conversations of its users. Chinese engineers helped create the app.
The data harvested from the app, according to a 2019 American intelligence assessment, was stored by an Emirati firm called Pax AI, which Mr. Xiao ran.
Bill Marczak of Citizen Lab, a digital watchdog group at the University of Toronto, has researched the constellation of companies controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, and called them “master classes in blending state power and business.”
“Because ToTok worked so well, its popularity took off among Emiratis and their contacts abroad,” Mr. Marczak said. “And since the app’s encryption didn’t prevent Group 42 from accessing ToTok users’ conversations, the app could have fed a huge volume of juicy data back to U.A.E. intelligence.”
Mr. Marczak said that G42 “seems to have absorbed assets and personnel from Chinese chat app YeeCall in order to create ToTok.” After a New York Times investigation into ToTok in 2019, company representatives denied that it had been built to be a spy tool.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, G42 partnered with a Chinese biotech firm, BGI Genomics, to distribute its Covid-19 tests, and the Emirati government donated tens of thousands of the tests to the State of Nevada. American officials warned Nevada officials not to distribute the tests out of concern that the operation could be a secret ploy by the Chinese government to gather genetic information about Americans from the tests, The Associated Press reported.
In March, the Biden administration put subsidiaries of BGI on a Commerce Department blacklist and said that collection and analysis of genetic data done by the companies “poses a significant risk of contributing to monitoring and surveillance by the government of China.”