Sudden Deaths in China’s AI Tech Sector Raise Red Flags

China’s brightest minds in AI are dying suddenly — and no one’s asking the questions that matter. Officially, they died from illness or accidents — but what if that’s not the whole story?

A troubling pattern has emerged in the high-stakes global race to develop artificial intelligence technology — one that has sparked shock in the Chinese scientific establishment, and the world searching for answers that do not exist.

Early on July 1, 2023, Colonel Feng Yanghe, a 38-year-old associate professor at China’s National University of Defence Technology, fell ill and died under mysterious circumstances in Beijing. The official obituary, which was distributed by a funeral work group instead of through government channels, did not specify a cause of death.

Some sources state that Feng was in a vehicle that became stuck in a bad accident. More reports specify that the military sedan he was in crashed on a cement truck, killing him immediately. What makes this case particularly fascinating, of course, is the fact that Feng was apparently en route for a “major mission” at the time of his accident.

Feng was no ordinary scientist. He was an emerging leader in military artificial intelligence, helming teams that created the War Skull I and the War Skull II artificial intelligence systems deployed by the People’s Liberation Army to run military war games. Feng, who has written over 60 papers on academic research and four books, was seen as a key element of China’s defense technology sector. He had studied at leading American institutions — Harvard University and the University of Iowa — before returning to China to help advance its military capabilities.

But Feng’s was only one in a troubling string of deaths.

In June 2022, Sun Jian, aged 45 when he died of what was referred to as a “sudden illness,” served as chief scientist at the Beijing-based AI company Megvii Technology. Sun, a former Microsoft researcher with extensive experience in computer vision and computational photography, was an MIT Technology Review Innovators under 35 award winner and held 35 U.S. patents. Strangely, Sun had looked healthy and vibrant when he had made a public appearance just one day prior to his death, witnesses said. Sun had gone for a routine run that evening and collapsed when he got home, according to several company insiders.

The trend continued in December 2023 when Tang Xiaoou, a Chinese University of Hong Kong professor and cofounder of tech firm SenseTime, died at age 55. His company’s obituary said Tang had “lost the battle to an illness,” but did not specify what that illness was. Tang, who earned his doctorate from MIT in 1996, was a key player in the industrialization of AI vision technology in China.

The next year, in 2024, another cofounder and chief innovation officer of an AI-driven healthcare company, Yidu Tech, He Zhi died at only 41. Qi Zhu said the official explanation cited “respiratory and cardiac arrest due to altitude sickness” while he was in Qinghai, a high-altitude province in northwest China.

The last of these cases occurred in January 2025, when 39-year-old Quan Yuhui, a computer image processing expert and associate professor at the South China University of Technology, died of an unnamed illness. A graduate of the National University of Singapore, Quan had written more than 80 academic papers at a high level and was on Stanford University’s “World’s top 2 percent scientists” list in 2024.

Another January 2025 casualty was Zhang Daibing, called the “ceiling” (meaning best, unsurpassable) of the Chinese drone industry. Although official statements said only that he died, not why, Zhang apparently took his own life — and only at just 47 years old — but the pressure of the debt and financial demands from his technology company had become too much.

What do all these deaths have in common, other than the field of AI and advanced technology in which they arose? The terse, specious, vague explanations offered up by authorities. The deaths can be explained away — sudden illnesses, car accidents or, in Zhang’s case, potential suicide — which under different circumstances would fall within the realm of plausible individual cause, but together sound alarms considering the strategic importance of the work of the victims.

Details surrounding these deaths have led to fevered speculation on Chinese social media, with many users demanding thorough investigations and greater protection for the country’s foremost scientific minds. Some commentators have taken it a step further, claiming that these deaths were not accidents at all, but rather targeted assassinations in a covert war of technology.

The official explanations tend to land on one reason: intense pressure. China’s artificial intelligence industry has progressed at breakneck speed. Computer scientist Liu Shaoshan said in an interview with the South China Morning Post that AI researchers could make high salaries, but were under tremendous competitive pressure.

“The industry is changing so fast, and the competition is so keen,” Liu said, adding that a researcher might develop an idea halfway through an experiment and someone else already published a paper on the same idea.

This pressure is made worse by the high stakes of China’s technological rivalry with the United States. Chinese scientists are likely to produce breakthroughs that are on par with — or even superior to — what Americans can deliver, typically for a fraction of the cost. Most of the dead scientists had studied or worked in the United States before returning to China, placing them in the potentially uncomfortable position of being seen with suspicion by both countries.

Some observers compare it to a previously documented case of scientists allegedly dying under mysterious circumstances — the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2020, largely attributed to Israeli intelligence operations to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

These deaths of Chinese AI and tech experts could be part of a similar covert campaign. Such a theory might not be substantiated by concrete evidence — but due to the strategic importance of military applications of AI, it’s difficult to dismiss entirely.

Scientists engaged in cutting-edge technologies are especially vulnerable targets in any covert action. Unlike high-profile politicians or business leaders, they are not typically given extensive security protection — yet their work can be vital to national security and technological advancement.

Inscrutable things add to this mystery, such as China’s “Thousand Talents” program, which since 2008 has been trying to woo Chinese and foreign specialists abroad to take jobs in Chinese universities and research institutes. Many of the dead scientists had been abroad studying or working before returning to China — and would fit a description of those that were targeted by this program.

The program has been a source of tension between China and the United States, with American officials saying it has aided intellectual property theft. Indeed, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Department of Justice and FBI together investigated more than 250 researchers from China based in the U.S. from 2018 to 2020, based on alleged failures to disclose work they did in China or violations of other rules.

Like many mysteries where geopolitics meets technology, definitive answers are elusive. Was it just random chance that five leading scientists in artificial intelligence died prematurely within a few years of one another? Were their deaths merely due to overwork in a high-pressure business? Or is something more sinister at work in the shadows of the global technology race?

What we do know is that the stakes in this tech duel are as high as they get. As Zhang Junhua, an artificial intelligence expert, cautiously pointed out: “There’s no doubt that China and the U.S. are in a growing race for advanced technologies — and that the risks for individuals in the equation are rising.”

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