U.S. intelligence assessments warn that China is combining artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and military-civil fusion in ways that could significantly expand its biological warfare capabilities.
The United States government has long assessed that China operated an offensive biological weapons program from the early 1950s through at least the late 1980s. Two facilities in Beijing and Lingbao City, according to the State Department, weaponized ricin, botulinum toxin, anthrax, plague, cholera, and tularemia during that period. China acceded to the Biological Weapons Convention on November 15, 1984, which prohibits the development, production, and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons.
Beijing has consistently maintained it has never possessed such weapons and is in full compliance. The State Department’s position, however, is that China likely continued operating an offensive program after signing the convention and that the earlier program was never verified as dismantled, a requirement the treaty imposes on all signatories. Beijing canceled a bilateral BWC-related meeting with Washington in early 2022 and has declined to provide the treaty’s required disclosures.
What concerns analysts today is not only what China may have inherited from the Cold War but what it is building now. The State Department’s 2025 annual arms control compliance report found that China’s People’s Liberation Army continued biological and toxin research with potential weapons applications throughout 2024. For the first time, the report stated that China “probably is capable of using publicly available artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to advance efforts related to biological weapons applications.”
The same report noted that Beijing has still failed to fully disclose details about its historical offensive program, including the weaponized ricin and botulinum toxins the United States has documented, as the convention requires. The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence used stronger language than the year before. Where previous assessments said China “probably” possessed chemical and biological warfare capabilities, the 2025 report concluded China “most likely” possesses those capabilities and that they pose a threat to U.S. military forces and civilian populations.
The Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2025 worldwide threat statement echoed that finding, adding that China’s nuclear and advanced delivery systems are now capable of delivering catastrophic damage to the United States homeland.
The core of the current problem is what analysts call the dual-use dilemma. Under China’s National Intelligence Law and its Military-Civil Fusion policy, the People’s Liberation Army has legal authority to access all civilian research and infrastructure, with no institutional firewall between a university biology lab and the PLA. The State Department’s December 2024 report on biotechnology in China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy found that PRC policies “encourage the use of biotechnology tools, skills, and knowledge and biological data sets obtained through civilian R&D to benefit the PLA.”
China’s biotech sector has grown to become second only to that of the United States in market capitalization. Many life science researchers in Chinese academia and industry hold PLA officer commissions. Its 14th Five-Year Plan prioritizes the convergence of biotechnology and information technologies as a national strategic goal. The country’s National GeneBank Database is one of the world’s largest repositories of genetic information, and in 2016 Beijing launched a 15-year, $9 billion effort to collect, analyze, and sequence genomic data.
While precision medicine is a stated goal, analysts note that the same datasets can be used to engineer precision bioweapons. China has also sought access to U.S. health care data through joint projects with American universities, medical institutes, and research organizations.
The PLA’s own doctrinal writings make the military ambitions explicit. The 2020 edition of The Science of Military Strategy, the authoritative PLA officer textbook, identifies biology as a domain for military struggle and anticipates that biotechnology, including biological weapons, will dominate future battlefields. The 2017 edition introduced discussion of “specific ethnic genetic attacks,” weapons designed to target particular genetic profiles.
Former PLA general Zhang Shibo, in a book published that year, described modern biotechnology as showing “strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability,” including the potential for attacks targeting specific ethnic groups. PLA Colonel Guo Ji-wei has written about biotechnology affording militaries the ability to design agents that “attack only key enemies without harming ordinary people.”
The 2025 State Department compliance report also disclosed new details about China’s research into marine toxins, with U.S. intelligence assessing that China is using civilian research nominally designed to prevent seafood and shellfish poisoning as cover for biological weapons development.
A separate State Department compliance report found that China appears to be violating the Chemical Weapons Convention as well, through research on pharmaceutical-based agents with dual civilian-military applications, with scientists at a Chinese military research institute having “expressed interest in military applications” of those agents.
The CCP BioThreats Initiative, a think tank whose January 2024 report was written by a former U.S. Army microbiologist and a former Air Force intelligence officer, concluded that bioweapons are “part of the CCP’s standard order of battle” and that the PLA controls all civilian biological research in China. Dual-use programs in development include human genome editing for soldiers, genetic manipulation of bacteria, and human-computer interfaces, assessed as “core strategic focus areas” designed for near-term use, including in a potential Taiwan conflict.
Several policy responses have been proposed or enacted. The BIOSECURE Act, which prohibits federal contracting with certain Chinese biotechnology companies, was signed into law in December 2025 as part of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act. Export controls on equipment and materials relevant to advanced biological research have been tightened, though enforcement remains uneven. The Council on Strategic Risks, in its April 2025 assessment of the ODNI threat findings, called for reducing U.S. pharmaceutical dependence on China, protecting domestic biodefense research programs from budget cuts, and expanding biomanufacturing capacity. The Heritage Foundation has called for a congressional blue-ribbon commission on the Chinese biological threat, stronger restrictions on technology transfers, and tighter controls on the sale of U.S. genomic data to foreign adversaries.
What is publicly known is already sufficient to establish a pattern: a historical bioweapons program never formally closed, a legal and institutional architecture that funnels civilian science into military hands, doctrinal writings that treat biology as a legitimate domain of warfare, and an expanding AI capability applied to biological research.
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