The Human Rights Foundation funded Citizen Power Initiatives for China (CPIFC) on November 24, 2025, as one of eight grantees in the first round of its AI for Individual Rights program. The grant funds two parallel research tracks: how the Chinese government uses AI to reinforce its surveillance apparatus and exports those tools to other authoritarian states, and which open-source AI tools human rights defenders can adopt to resist that infrastructure.
CPIFC is a Washington, D.C. nonprofit founded in 2008 by Yang Jianli, a Tiananmen-generation dissident who returned to China in 2002 to support labor organizing and was imprisoned for five years before being released. Yang holds a Harvard doctorate in political economy and is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. The organization is structured as a pro-democracy advocacy and research group, with past work spanning the U.S. and Australian Magnitsky Acts, Liu Xiaobo's representation at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and the Interethnic Interfaith Leadership Conferences begun in 2000.
The AI track builds on CPIFC's recent published research. In June 2025 Yang ran a comparative test of American models (ChatGPT-4 and Grok 3) and Chinese models (DeepSeek-R1 and Baidu's ERNIE Bot X1) on prompts about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, documenting how the Chinese systems suppress or recast the event. An August 2025 piece in The National Interest analyzed DeepSeek's rise and the implications for U.S. export controls, and an October 2025 piece described Beijing's coordination of AI "national champions" including Alibaba, DeepSeek, Huawei, Baidu, and Tencent across surveillance, manufacturing, and military applications.
The HRF-funded research extends this methodology: documenting AI-enabled repression as a transnational export, and cataloging open-weights models and tooling that activists outside China can adopt as a counter-stack. Individual grant amounts in the first round were not disclosed.
Recipient
Citizen Power Initiatives for China
Funder
Human Rights Foundation · foundation · Global
Funds open-source AI tools that put inference, agentic capability, and private compute into the hands of dissidents and civil society under authoritarian regimes.
Primary source
https://hrf.org/latest/hrf-announces-support-for-projects-advancing-ai-for-individual-rights/
Additional sources
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