Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A government-funded researcher fails to disclose a paid foreign appointment with intellectual property transfer obligations; investigators conclude undue foreign influence occurred.
- Is an instance
A reviewer recuses themselves after identifying undisclosed obligations to a foreign sponsor of a proposal under review.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A multinational consortium with transparent governance and disclosed funding is collaboration, not undue influence.
- Not an instance
A foreign-born researcher with no foreign sponsor obligations is not an instance of foreign influence.
Editorial commentary
Undue foreign influence describes conduct — not a person’s nationality or origin — that departs from ordinary international scientific collaboration: undisclosed financial or in-kind support from a foreign government or entity, duplicative or hidden appointments, diversion of intellectual property outside normal channels, or breaches of peer-review confidentiality that favour a foreign sponsor. The concept is defined by what is concealed, not by who a researcher works with; transparent, disclosed international collaboration is the ordinary and encouraged case, not an instance of undue influence.
Where the term comes from
The phrase entered US federal research policy through NIH: in August 2018, NIH Director Francis Collins sent a letter to grantee institutions raising concerns about undisclosed foreign support, and NIH’s Advisory Committee to the Director convened a working group that reported in December 2018. NIH followed with a formal notice in July 2019 reiterating disclosure expectations for Other Support, foreign components, and financial conflicts of interest. The National Science Foundation separately commissioned the JASON Report on research security, published December 2019, which examined the same set of concerns for the broader federal research enterprise and became the intellectual foundation for the disclosure-centred policy response that followed, including NSPM-33 (2021) and the CHIPS and Science Act (2022).
Undue foreign influence is the general problem statement; it is not itself a specific filing or legal test. A foreign talent recruitment programme is one specific mechanism through which undue influence can occur, with its own statutory definition in US law; a research security policy is the institutional response built to detect and prevent it; and disclosures such as Current and Pending Support are the operational instruments through which transparency is actually achieved. Detection in practice combines self-disclosure, peer or institutional reporting, and structured risk review — the policy consensus since the JASON Report has been to treat non-disclosure itself, rather than the underlying foreign relationship, as the compliance problem to be addressed.
Also known as
malign foreign influence · improper foreign influence
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Undue foreign influence"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/undue-foreign-influence" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/undue-foreign-influence",
"name": "Undue foreign influence",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/undue-foreign-influence",
"description": "The exertion of pressure, control, or hidden incentives by a foreign government or its proxies that distorts research conduct, integrity, or outputs to advance the interests of that foreign state at the expense of the funding country, host institution, or scientific community.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-security#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/undue-foreign-influence",
"alternateName": [
"malign foreign influence",
"improper foreign influence"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:22:53",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T16:26:24",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
