US lab probes Chinese lidar for security risks

A Department of Energy lab, Idaho National Laboratory, is investigating whether Chinese lidar sensors could pose a security risk if they become widely used on vehicles in the United States, TechCrunch has learned. Two people familiar with the effort said the research is being funded by a company — or group of companies — in the electric and autonomous vehicle industries; it’s not clear which ones. Representatives for Rivian, GM, Ford, Kodiak, Lucid Motors, Nuro, and Uber — all reported to be considering Chinese lidar — said they weren’t aware of the review; Nvidia, Zoox, and Aurora didn’t respond to questions about involvement. The lab declined to comment, and China’s leading lidar suppliers, Hesai and RoboSense, didn’t respond to requests for comment either.

Lidar uses laser pulses to measure distance to nearby objects, giving autonomous-vehicle systems a high-resolution picture of their surroundings. The review comes as pressure mounts to ban Chinese lidar from American roads, with lawmakers crafting multiple bills. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), who is spearheading one such bill with Senator Ted Budd (R-NC), told TechCrunch she’s primarily concerned about Chinese lidar being used for military or industrial espionage: “As infrastructure becomes more sophisticated, the threat Chinese LiDAR technology poses to American communities and our national security cannot be allowed to go unchecked,” she said. A separate bill focuses on the risk of “back doors” transmitting data back to Chinese interests.

Security researchers describe layered risks: a basic supply-chain risk, since Beijing has deemed lidar strategically important technology; and cybersecurity risks, including the theoretical possibility that sensors could be disabled en masse or that the detailed surroundings data lidar collects could be compressed and exfiltrated via a cellular chip. Individual sensors have been disabled with lasers in research settings, though it’s unclear how China could cause disruption at scale. These concerns matter more now because lidar costs have fallen sharply — from as much as $75,000 a decade ago to a few hundred dollars in some cases — as Chinese suppliers scaled production, while U.S. lidar makers have consolidated or, in Luminar’s case, filed for bankruptcy, pushing more automakers to consider Chinese suppliers despite an unclear regulatory outlook: the Pentagon has placed Hesai and RoboSense on a list restricting their work with the U.S. military, and a 2025 Commerce Department rule bars Chinese-made connectivity hardware in passenger cars, though it doesn’t cover lidar.

Why it matters

As lidar gets cheap enough for mainstream use, the debate over Chinese sensors is becoming a test case for how far U.S. industrial policy will go to keep Chinese components out of an emerging safety-critical technology, even before regulators can point to a documented attack.