For years, national security debates focused on chips, networks, and software. This week, a U.S. senator in one of the top intelligence roles suggested we may have been watching the wrong frontier. The next Huawei, he warned, isn’t building routers. It’s collecting DNA.

BGI’s rise worries U.S. officials not because genomics is inherently dangerous, but because scale changes meaning. At global volumes, genetic data stops being just medical information and starts looking like strategic infrastructure. Combined with AI, it can support surveillance, population modeling, and long-term military research. That’s why Senator Mark Warner described the situation in unusually blunt terms: “It’s terrifying.” Could this lead to biological warfare?

There’s a familiar pattern here. State-backed expansion, early global access, and standards-setting before governments grasp the implications. Huawei followed it in telecom. Warner fears BGI is following it in biotech. And once again, lawmakers are asking whether the response is arriving after the architecture is already in place.

The deeper issue is not China alone. It’s whether intelligence systems built to watch governments can adapt quickly enough to track commercial technology that quietly becomes national power. In a world where data defines advantage, spying isn’t just about secrets anymore. It’s about understanding who controls the future inputs.

TL;DR
🧠 DNA is being treated as strategic data
⚡ Biotech joins chips and AI as intel priority
🎓 Commercial tech now shapes security risk
🔍 Standards-setting may decide long-term power

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/06/china-us-technology-spying-senate-concerns.html

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