Foreign states are extracting openly, legally and at scale from Western systems that were built on trust, transparency, and collaboration. Paul Maddison, Australia, and New Zealand Country Manager at Strider Technologies, talks about a threat that rarely announces itself.
“Strider is a company that was founded six years ago in response to this sort of new and rapidly evolving geopolitical era we find ourselves in,” Maddison says.
Western nations, he explains, are now confronting competitors “from authoritarian states like the PRC, Russia and Iran who are leveraging their instruments of national power to drive global campaigns to identify and transfer disruptive technologies back into their innovation ecosystems, to be applied for geoeconomic and often military advantage.”
This isn’t espionage in the traditional sense. It’s strategic exploitation of openness.
Patent databases. Academic publications. Public research partnerships. Talent programs. Corporate disclosures. The same mechanisms that fuel Western innovation are now being used to map capability, identify targets, and siphon advantage, without triggering alarms.
“We at Strider Technologies are committed to protecting the ideals and the innovation of Western societies, helping our clients in the private sector, in universities and in governments better see these state-sponsored risks that are present across their enterprises,” Maddison says.
The scale of the problem is no longer speculative.
“In the United States, it’s conservatively estimated that IP theft runs annually at half a trillion dollars,” Maddison says. “The director of the domestic intelligence agency earlier this year put a figure on IP theft from state-sponsored entities at conservatively $12.5 billion.”
These are not one-off losses. They compound over time, eroding industrial advantage, hollowing out innovation pipelines and shifting power incrementally but decisively.
What makes this more dangerous is how long it can persist without detection, unfortunately.
Most institutions assume they are exposed. Very few can demonstrate how…or where.
“We quickly move from anecdotal thinking to evidence-based decision quality insights at scale,” Maddison says.
Strider uses generative AI across vast volumes of open source data to surface patterns of state-backed recruitment, technology targeting, and institutional exposure that are invisible to manual analysis and often outside the reach of traditional intelligence channels.
When those findings are presented, the reaction is frequently confronting.
“Often, for universities there is a bit of a jaw-dropping moment when they see the evidence-based exposure to risk that their people have been involved in over many, many years,” Maddison says.
This isn’t about wrongdoing, it’s about asymmetry… one side treating openness as principle, the other as opportunity.
The story of Charles Lieber is often framed as an outlier. Maddison disagrees.
“Charles Lieber was running a talent recruitment program for the PRC. He was arrested, incarcerated in the United States. He was being paid about $50,000 US a month to do this on behalf of the PRC government,” he says. “He served his time, was freed from prison in the US, and turned up very shortly thereafter as an emeritus professor at a university in China.”
The point is not the individual. It’s the system that allowed the activity to operate undetected for years and the many less visible cases that never reach a courtroom.
By the time institutions understand what has occurred, the advantage has already moved.
The threat is accelerating because the environment has changed.
“What has changed is the amount of data that’s publicly available,” Maddison says. “The amount of publicly available data is increasing exponentially.”
AI has made it possible to collect, curate, and analyse global data sets at speed, surfacing actionable risk insights in near real time.
“The ability to use AI to search the global data set… and surface actionable risk insights at incredible speed is what allows our clients to track in near real time their exposure. That’s what’s game changing here.”
Foreign states are already optimised for this environment. Western institutions, in many cases, are not.
Strider’s work sits in the open, deliberately.
“We’re helping a whole of nation surge in our western democracies to better understand and mitigate state-sponsored risk,” Maddison says.
This is not about shutting down collaboration or retreating from global engagement. It is about awareness, understanding who is targeting people, programs, and supply chains, and why.
“I think that governments will increasingly embrace partnership with companies like ours to drive the open source component of the intelligence cycle,” he says. Unclassified, actionable intelligence delivers ‘greater speed, greater agility, greater awareness of the global state-sponsored risk challenge.’
Foreign interference in Western innovation ecosystems is not hypothetical. It is ongoing, cumulative, and largely unchallenged.
The systems enabling it are the same ones Western institutions celebrate most which include openness, collaboration, transparency.
