Investigation into Utah Racetrack Uncovers Unforeseen Links to China
(Bloomberg) — Investigators from the Utah Department of Public Safety found themselves at a perplexing impasse.
Located about 40 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, a seemingly nondescript motorsports track raised fundamental questions regarding its true ownership.
This inquiry held critical significance: In 2023, Utah aligned with states implementing bans on adversaries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia from acquiring land, with the racetrack’s trails positioned alarmingly close to a U.S. military ammunition depot.
By delving into corporate and employment records, Utah officials sought to illuminate the identities behind Mitime Utah Investment LLC, the entity purportedly owning the track.
While its executives possessed U.S. passports, the investigative trail quickly dwindled. In response, officials sought assistance from Strider Technologies, a Utah firm that has dedicated nearly a decade to creating a private equivalent to intelligence services for nation-states.
According to Utah authorities, Mitime Utah Investment LLC, the owner of a racetrack in Grantsville, exhibited connections to the Chinese government and military.
Utilizing Strider’s sophisticated platform, which scrutinizes billions of public documents, corporate records, foreign trade data, and multilingual files, investigators unraveled Mitime’s corporate networks, linking them directly to entities tied to the Chinese government and military.
“This produced an overwhelming volume of information,” remarked Tanner Jensen, the head of the department.
The insights garnered from Strider underscore the escalating necessity of private investigations as the Trump administration amplifies efforts to reduce U.S. economic reliance on China. States nationwide have emulated this tightening approach.
The timing is fortuitous for Strider, which unveiled its inaugural “agent” AI feature on Thursday. The firm has already secured minor contracts with the U.S. Air Force, various state governments, and NATO, while continually expanding its roster of former international intelligence directors.
This tension between global capital and national security has birthed an emergent market category: the commercialization of counterintelligence, addressing issues related to supply chain risk, intellectual property theft, and insider threats.
This market is burgeoning amid rising apprehensions regarding AI technologies and the potential hazards associated with public data utilization and privacy infringements.
The enterprise of identifying state actors—charting their shell corporations, recognizing their agents, and monitoring their acquisition of foreign technologies—has historically been the sole purview of government intelligence agencies, funded by taxpayers and operating within classified frameworks.
What remained known was often incommunicable. Consequently, the private sector’s utility was stymied.
Strider has ingeniously transformed a previously public function into a private enterprise, thereby enabling organizations that can afford a subscription to access these capabilities. In the instance of the U.S. Air Force, the investment exceeded $8 million.
Describing its offering, Strider has built “a digital twin of the industrial landscape, down to the individual level”—mapping current and former personnel across thousands of organizations, their suppliers, technologies, and inter-business relationships, all derived from public sources in multiple languages.
For NATO, the firm provides services related to risk assessment, strategic intelligence, and economic security, as stated by a spokesperson. The financial specifics of Strider’s contract with NATO remain undisclosed.
Strider’s involvement in such sensitive domains raises concerns about the implications of a significant breach, hostile acquisition, or litigation in jurisdictions monitored by the company.
“It’s a formidable methodology for executing widespread surveillance. My specific concern lies in the general public’s unawareness of what data is accumulated about them and the means to counter it,” commented Jennifer King, a data privacy researcher at Stanford, regarding data collection practices.
CEO Greg Levesque indicated that the founding team anticipated the potential for risk, structuring the company’s architecture with this consideration in mind: redundancy, encryption, and a pivotal “zero-touch” model, which precludes Strider from ingesting or storing client data.
According to Levesque, the company’s systems, practices, and usage terms were designed to comply with established legal frameworks while prioritizing accuracy, transparency, and ethical data utilization.
“Our assessment is grounded in verifiable, open-source information that generates risk signals—not automated conclusions—to facilitate well-informed decision-making.”
Strider’s post-Series C valuation, completed in September 2024, reached $450 million. Since this funding round, Levesque mentioned that the company has nearly tripled its revenue and is exploring additional financing.
Operating in 16 countries, he noted that his co-founder and chairman, Eric Levesque, is based in London, while he maintains discretion about specific client identities but affirmed that Strider serves eight of the top ten Fortune 500 enterprises.
The competitive landscape includes firms such as Sayari, Datenna, and Exiger, which focus primarily on supply chain risks, while others like Recorded Future and Lexis target intellectual property theft.
Strider distinguishes itself by addressing both sectors alongside strategic intelligence, a feat deemed challenging for competitors to replicate, as noted by Blake Modersitzki of Pelion Ventures, who led the Series C funding and is a board member at Strider.
Laura Galante, a former senior U.S. intelligence official with significant experience monitoring state-sponsored information operations, predicts continued market growth irrespective of who serves it.
“We are witnessing a substantial shift, where geopolitical rivalry manifests across private networks and against tangible corporate assets,” he remarked.
“Most companies recognize this vulnerability but lack effective mechanisms to manage or regulate it across various business lines, suppliers, and geographies.”
In a demonstration, Levesque executed a live query across Strider’s extensive dataset: How are U.S.-manufactured semiconductors being integrated into Russian and Iranian drone programs despite sanctions imposed post-2022?
The system operated for approximately two minutes, sifting through military procurement databases in third-party countries and generating a map detailing around 33,000 shipments, assessed at approximately $240 million.
It pinpointed post-sanction trade diversion pathways traversing Shenzhen and Hong Kong while ranking component suppliers by volume, highlighting significant chipmakers within the results. The computational expense was less than $20.
Whether Strider has successfully identified the gap it seeks to fill and whether its platform genuinely mitigates this void or merely narrows it remains to be seen.
The Utah land cases provide some of the clearest evidence of measurable outcomes. However, the more intricate assertion that the “agent” AI can deliver reliable, actionable intelligence on an enterprise scale has yet to be validated in a practical setting.
Leah Siskind, who investigates the adversarial applications of artificial intelligence at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, emphasizes the necessity for transparency concerning AI systems.
In July of the previous year, the White House declared the establishment of a center aimed at disseminating information and insights regarding threats.
“There is no timeline for this to materialize, and we were in need of it yesterday,” she remarked. For companies like Strider deploying agent AI, “the potential for significant advancements exists, but so do substantial risks.”
In Utah, Tanner Jensen awaits the state legislature’s confirmation of budget allocations so his department can secure a continuous license for Strider’s services.
Weeks ago, the racetrack was successfully sold to an American entity. Additionally, the prospective transaction for land adjacent to Provo Airport—traced through Strider’s system to considerable Chinese government ownership—was curtailed before formal completion. Meanwhile, the divestiture of another agricultural expanse totaling 30,000 acres has been finalized.
Mitime Utah Investment LLC operates as a subsidiary of Geely Holding Group, headquartered in Zhejiang, China. Attempts to elicit a response from the company or its executives via email and LinkedIn went unanswered.
Source link: Lnginnorthernbc.ca.
