ECONOMIC WARFARE: IS FRANCE ONE WAR BEHIND?

The economic war we barely see

We constantly talk about industrial sovereignty, reindustrialisation, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, nuclear power, space, batteries, quantum technologies and cybersecurity. Yet one decisive question almost always remains outside French public debate: in this competition, does the State merely protect what we already possess, or does it also actively seek to learn what competitors are preparing, understand their weaknesses and obtain information that can give French industry years of lead time? The question is uncomfortable because it forces us beyond a naïve view of international trade. States can be allies on one issue and competitors on another; companies cooperate while fighting for markets; civilian technologies become military technologies; capital buys patents, teams and sometimes entire industrial chains. In that world, economic intelligence is no exotic add-on to industrial policy: it is one of the instruments of power.

China is often cited as the most offensive model. It combines public and private research, massive funding, company acquisitions, talent recruitment, university partnerships, systematic patent analysis, reverse engineering, human intelligence and cyber-espionage. The United States uses a different mix: financial power, venture capital, foreign-investment screening, export restrictions, commercial diplomacy, sanctions, standards, worldwide attraction of researchers and an intelligence community with enormous resources. Faced with these two giants, French debate is often reduced to a caricature: either France would be a strictly legalistic State that only defends itself, or its services would secretly do exactly what everyone else does while nothing is ever visible. Public sources allow a much more precise picture.

This dossier does not allege any specific operation that is not publicly documented. It does not claim to know whom the DGSE recruits, which networks it penetrates, which foreign systems it targets or which companies are operational priorities. It instead brings together statute law, CNCTR publications, parliamentary reports, statements by intelligence officials, French strategic documents, foreign court decisions and proceedings, European Parliament work and specialised reporting. The result is more nuanced than a slogan, but also more troubling: France does possess the legal basis, capabilities and history required for offensive economic intelligence; what seems more uncertain is our ability to turn the information obtained quickly enough into a collective industrial advantage.

French law does not provide only for defence: it also provides for promotion

The first thing to understand is written in the French Internal Security Code. Article L. 811-3 authorises intelligence techniques for the defence and promotion of the Nation’s fundamental interests, explicitly including France’s major economic, industrial and scientific interests. The word “promotion” matters. It means that the economic purpose of French intelligence is not purely protective. The law is not limited to preventing a competitor from stealing a French process; within each service’s remit and the conditions established by law, intelligence may also be sought to support national economic and technological power.

The National Commission for the Oversight of Intelligence Techniques, the CNCTR, states this even more plainly in its public presentation of the lawful purposes of intelligence. It recalls that the services may contribute not only to defending but also to promoting French economic and industrial interests, and that they are expected in particular to support France’s industrial development against foreign competitors. That wording matters because it contradicts the idea that French economic intelligence is legally confined to counter-interference. The law recognises an active dimension. The limit is not the very existence of offensive ambition; it lies in lawful purpose, competence, necessity, proportionality, oversight and, for a large part of operations, secrecy.

The same logic applies to international communications. The Code creates a specific framework for monitoring communications sent or received abroad when justified by the defence or promotion of the Nation’s fundamental interests. This obviously does not give France a general licence to steal any commercial secret it wants. It does show, however, that the legal framework was designed so that foreign intelligence can take part in protecting and promoting major economic interests. A serious debate should therefore not begin by asking whether France is “allowed to take an interest” in foreign technologies: it can, within the legal framework. The real questions are how that capacity is used and, above all, how the intelligence produced is exploited by the State.

Economic intelligence, industrial espionage and technology: do not confuse everything

Much public confusion comes from vocabulary. Competitive or economic intelligence includes perfectly lawful activities: patent analysis, scientific monitoring, supply-chain studies, supplier mapping, tracking a competitor’s recruitment, financial analysis, observation of public procurement, use of academic publications and open-source collection. A company or a State can learn an enormous amount without crossing any legal line. In technology sectors, open sources can sometimes reconstruct an entire strategy: which kind of engineer is being hired, in which city, for which programme, with which partners, machines and suppliers.

Economic espionage begins when the information sought is not normally accessible and a power uses clandestine means to obtain it. That may involve recruiting a human source, interception, a cyber operation, indirect access to a database, exploiting an intermediary, a professional relationship or a front company. Industrial espionage focuses more directly on manufacturing secrets, processes, test results, source code, development plans, production parameters, costs and commercial strategy. Technological intelligence is broader still: it seeks to establish what actually works, where the breakthroughs are, which laboratories are ahead, who possesses rare skills, which technologies are failing and which sectors are about to change.

Another common image also needs correcting: “stealing a patent” is usually not the heart of the problem, because a published patent is already public. The real value often lies in what was never published: the production adjustment that delivers the expected yield, successive failures, the material ultimately selected, test data, design trade-offs, known defects, the real cost of production or a team’s tacit knowledge. That is why an experienced engineer may be more valuable than a server full of documents. A technical file explains what was done; people know why it was done, what did not work and what should be tried next.

China: a total technology-acquisition policy

Reducing China’s rise to “technology theft” would be both false and dangerous. China in 2026 is no longer an economy that merely copies others. It invests massively in research, trains huge numbers of engineers, finances entire sectors, attracts researchers, develops its own champions and files a remarkable volume of international patent applications. The World Intellectual Property Organization placed China among the ten most innovative economies in the world in 2025. That same year China filed 73,718 international PCT applications, compared with 52,617 for the United States and 7,778 for France. The number does not automatically measure quality, but it shows the scale of the effort and the technological base that has been built.

What makes the Chinese model formidable is the combination of instruments. A technology considered strategic may be approached through investment, a joint venture, a university partnership, expert recruitment, publication analysis, equipment purchases, the acquisition of a company, the return of researchers trained abroad, reverse engineering, human collection or cyber-espionage. The State, universities, state-owned companies, private firms and administrations operate in an environment in which national priorities are strongly coordinated. Clandestine intelligence is therefore only one component of a much broader system for acquiring and developing power.

US court cases nevertheless show that a clandestine dimension does exist. The Yanjun Xu case is one of the best documented. Described by the US Department of Justice as an officer of China’s Ministry of State Security, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison after being convicted, among other charges, of attempted economic espionage and attempted theft of trade secrets. DOJ documents described approaches targeting aviation, including GE Aviation, and methods combining academic contacts, invitations, travel, payments and requests for non-public technical information. The court record also referred to an operation involving a French aircraft-engine manufacturer and an attempt to obtain access to its IT environment. The case illustrates the modern pattern perfectly: human intelligence, industrial access and cyber methods can be combined in one operation.

France is directly concerned. Specialist reporting has documented Chinese attempts directed at Western aerospace and the environment of French groups. Intelligence Online has also followed a French investigation involving a former pilot suspected of supplying aviation expertise to Beijing, and a case involving a Chinese company established near Toulouse and suspected of listening activity close to space-sector actors and Airbus. In such cases, a strict methodological distinction must be kept between suspicion, investigation, accusation and conviction. But the recurrence of these signals is enough to show that technological competition is played out on French territory as well, in contact with engineers, subcontractors, laboratories and infrastructure.

Professional networks themselves have become recruitment grounds. LinkedIn now makes it possible in minutes to identify what once took a service months to map: an engineer worked on a particular programme, for a particular supplier, within a specific team and with a particular skill. Intelligence Online documented in 2026 approaches attributed to the Guoanbu, China’s Ministry of State Security, using professional platforms to contact European profiles and obtain strategic information. Human intelligence did not disappear with the digital world; it gained a gigantic global directory of sensitive skills.

The United States: intelligence is only one part of a much larger machine of power

The American strategy is different. The United States possesses a weapon few countries can reproduce: financial power capable of legally absorbing technologies, companies and talent from around the world. When a European startup moves its headquarters, patents, researchers and future projects to the United States after a funding round, there has been no espionage. Strategically, however, the result may be deeper than a one-off theft of documents: the team, intellectual property, financing, governance and future developments all shift into the American ecosystem. Venture capital and financial markets are therefore extraordinarily effective instruments for accumulating power.

Washington does not rely on the market alone. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS, reviews foreign investments that may threaten national security. The US Treasury stated that the committee examined a total of 347 declarations or notices in 2025, with particular attention to critical technologies, sensitive infrastructure and strategic data. At the same time, the United States uses export controls, restrictions on certain outbound investment, sanctions and trade policy to prevent competitors from accessing technologies regarded as essential. The logic is clear: buy abroad when doing so strengthens the American ecosystem, prevent others from buying what is considered critical at home, and control the spread of advanced capabilities.

The 2026 US national strategy for science and technology security openly embraces that linkage. It presents export controls, investment security and the protection of critical technologies as instruments of strategic competition in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, semiconductors, supercomputing and hypersonics. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence also has an Office of Economic Security and Emerging Technologies that coordinates intelligence-community support for investment security, trade-policy objectives and technology needs. The institutional convergence shows that in US doctrine, economics, technology and national security are increasingly inseparable.

It would nevertheless be naïve to conclude that the United States never conducts clandestine economic intelligence. The disclosures associated with Edward Snowden showed the scale of NSA collection, including against French and economic interests. The European Parliament’s ECHELON report had already examined allegations that signals intelligence was used in commercial competition involving Airbus and Thomson-CSF, while emphasising that some accounts were contradictory and that precise motivations were not always established. The important nuance therefore concerns use as much as collection. Public US doctrine has long maintained that it does not collect foreign trade secrets solely to hand a direct competitive advantage to a particular American company. That does not prevent economic collection for national security, or the use of intelligence for diplomacy, sanctions, negotiations and technology protection.

France has already practised openly offensive industrial intelligence

France has not always approached economic intelligence with the caution often attributed to it today. In the early 1980s, Pierre Marion, then head of the DGSE, pushed the service toward a much more direct policy of industrial espionage. In 1991 he publicly acknowledged having created a unit dedicated to industrial espionage. Accounts from the period describe around twenty officers tasked with obtaining documents from US companies and mention IBM, Texas Instruments and Corning. The rationale was straightforward: the United States could be a political and military ally while remaining an economic and technological competitor. The distinction may sound blunt today, but the strategic reality has never disappeared.

Le Monde revisited that history in 2013 and the Franco-American tensions surrounding economic espionage. In the late 1980s the FBI dismantled a French network targeting several American companies. A few years later, in 1995, France itself expelled or sought the departure of US officers suspected of economic espionage on French soil. The episode is a reminder that espionage between allies is not new and that the boundary between strategic cooperation and industrial competition has always been porous.

That history is essential to the current debate. It would be false to claim that French culture has always considered offensive economic espionage unthinkable. France practised it, and one of its former intelligence chiefs publicly acknowledged it. What appears to have changed since the 1990s concerns doctrine, organisation, political limits, oversight and the way information may be redistributed. The question is not whether France ever knew how to play offensively; it did. The question is what remains of that ambition today and in what form.

What France does today: economic intelligence exists, is tasked and has resources

Contemporary public reports show that economic intelligence has not disappeared. The Parliamentary Intelligence Delegation devoted an entire chapter in 2018 to intelligence of economic interest. It described intensifying international economic predation, growing attempts to capture technologies and the central role of cyber threats. More importantly, it stated that the DGSE and DGSI had historically been the main producers of intelligence of economic interest and that economic administrations, including the Treasury, submitted intelligence requirements to the services.

The clearest signal probably came from the director-general of the DGSE himself. At the Parliamentary Intelligence Delegation conference in December 2025, Nicolas Lerner explained that the service’s integration with French decision-makers had strengthened considerably, citing the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry for the Armed Forces and also the Ministry of the Economy. He stated that “economic intelligence now responds to requirements set by the machinery of State.” That statement alone rules out the idea of a DGSE only marginally involved in economic matters. There is a genuine economic demand placed on French foreign intelligence.

Budgetary and strategic documents point in the same direction. Parliamentary reports state that the DGSE is increasing resources devoted to economic intelligence in order to protect French companies, support national attractiveness and promote strategic sectors. The updated 2025 National Strategic Review also calls for greater use of offensive cyber capabilities for intelligence and disruption. The Ministry for the Armed Forces publicly acknowledges offensive cyber operations, while the DGSE describes significant technical capabilities in interception, cryptology, cyber threats and data processing. France is therefore not a State without sensors or technical expertise.

Intelligence Online also follows the existence of an economic-security function within the DGSE and the service’s closer links with private technology actors. Those elements prove no particular offensive operation. They do confirm that the economic dimension is structured and is not merely general rhetoric. France has a contemporary economic-intelligence apparatus linked to the Ministry of the Economy, defence and several strategic sectors.

Are we infiltrating major American or Chinese companies? What can seriously be said

The DGSE publicly identifies human intelligence as one of its fundamental professions. Official material on foreign intelligence describes officers able to cross borders, approach closed environments, recruit sources and collect information that is difficult to access. A major foreign technology company can obviously constitute an environment of interest to a service when the information sought corresponds to State strategic priorities. Nothing in the general logic of the profession prevents seeking a source inside a foreign industrial environment.

But the logical leap must be resisted. There is no public evidence allowing us to say that in 2026 French agents are infiltrated inside Microsoft, Nvidia, Boeing, SpaceX, Huawei, BYD, CATL, SMIC or other groups to steal their secrets. Nor is there public evidence identifying a particular foreign company as a current operational DGSE target. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; it simply means that a serious author cannot turn a general capability into a specific operation without a source.

The same principle applies in cyberspace. France possesses acknowledged offensive cyber capabilities, and strategic doctrine provides for their development. It is therefore reasonable to say that the State has means that could, in certain circumstances, penetrate foreign systems or extract information. It would be unfounded, however, to write that French services are currently hacking the servers of a foreign company in order to hand its designs to a French company. Precise operations are secret; what public sources establish is capability, the general economic purpose and the existence of an offensive intelligence doctrine, not a catalogue of targets.

Does the State hand foreign secrets to French companies?

This is probably the question that most directly interests industrialists and readers: if the DGSE learns something decisive, does the State pass it to French companies? Public sources allow us to answer yes as to the existence of economic support, but they do not demonstrate a contemporary mechanism for directly handing stolen industrial secrets to a private company. We know that the services produce intelligence of economic interest, that ministries formulate requirements, that strategic industrial actors exchange information with the State and that French history contains more direct precedents. We do not have a public document showing that a confidential plan clandestinely acquired today would be handed as such to Airbus, Safran, Thales, Dassault Aviation, EDF or another company.

There are good reasons for that caution. A raw document may reveal a human source, a technical method or an ongoing operation. Disseminating it to a company increases the risk of leakage. Its use could trigger litigation, a diplomatic crisis or an attack on a future patent. Preferential transfer of classified information to a private company also raises questions of competition and responsibility. Intelligence is therefore often transformed before it becomes useful. The State can use secret information to adjust industrial policy, block an acquisition, modify a negotiation, prepare regulation, finance a sector, support an export bid, strengthen an actor’s security or warn a company without ever handing over the raw material.

The distinction between raw intelligence and derived intelligence is essential. A service does not need to explain how it knows that a foreign technology will be delayed by two years. It can provide a high-confidence assessment and allow the public decision-maker to adjust a national programme. It need not transmit the source that predicts a coming restriction on a raw material; it can enable the ministry to secure a supply chain. Used in this way, intelligence becomes an accelerator of decision rather than a stockpile of secret documents handed to industry.

France has above all built a very visible shield

France’s apparatus is particularly developed on the defensive side. The DGSI protects against interference and the capture of know-how; the DRSD protects the defence sphere; the SISSE coordinates economic security; ANSSI addresses cyber threats; the Directorate General of Armaments protects the defence industrial and technological base; foreign-investment screening can block or condition sensitive acquisitions; and the system protecting scientific and technical potential applies controls to certain laboratories and technologies. France has built a genuine shield, far stronger than it was fifteen years ago.

The figures show the pressure. The Directorate General for Enterprise annual report for 2023 stated that almost 900 economic-security alerts had been processed that year, compared with 694 in 2022 and fewer than 400 in 2020. About 45% concerned attempted takeovers or significant equity stakes and nearly 45% concerned attempts to capture sensitive knowledge or know-how. In 2025, a parliamentary report still referred to more than 750 alerts for 2024 and between 500 and 550 proven attacks each year affecting the defence industrial and technological base. SMEs in the defence supply chain are particularly vulnerable.

Those figures raise a simple question. If France’s competitors devote so much effort to understanding our technologies, suppliers and vulnerabilities, why would France simply wait behind its fortifications? The official answer is that it does not entirely do so. But the contrast between the visibility of the defensive apparatus and the near invisibility of the offensive side fuels the impression of a country that protects more than it conquers. Part of that asymmetry is normal: counter-interference must publicly educate companies, while offensive collection is secret by nature. Another part nevertheless appears to reflect a genuine doctrinal problem.

The 2025 parliamentary report is much harsher than the official discourse

The report published on 16 July 2025 by the National Assembly Finance Committee on economic warfare is probably the most important public document for understanding French weaknesses. It recognises the progress made in protecting companies and screening investment, but considers the arrangements still too permissive, resources too dispersed and the French posture too defensive against competitors that openly embrace much more offensive strategies. One section of the report is even entitled “Towards a more offensive posture?”

The rapporteur recalls that the national intelligence strategy regards intelligence as an instrument not only for defending but also for promoting economic, scientific, military and political interests. Yet he argues that France retains, partly for cultural reasons, a restraint that several competitors do not share. That restraint would also affect the circulation of information toward economic actors, especially smaller ones. The report therefore calls for better coordination between intelligence services and strategic companies so that economic-intelligence action can be targeted more effectively.

The document goes further by discussing how competitive intelligence could identify critical technologies abroad and help French companies invest in strategic foreign firms. That proposal matters because it moves the offensive onto perfectly lawful ground: identify earlier than others the technologies that will matter, know where they are, understand which companies control them and organise an acquisition, partnership or investment before the window closes. The report is not calling for clandestine industrial looting; it is calling for a more deliberate policy of power.

France's real lag: turning information into power

France appears to have many sensors: DGSE, DGSI, DRSD, the diplomatic network, defence attachés, scientific services, the Treasury, DGA, SISSE, strategic companies and private competitive-intelligence operators. It also has an older tradition through ADIT, created in the early 1990s to make use of scientific and technological information collected abroad, including by embassy scientific services. The group later became a major private strategic-intelligence player active in many countries. France’s problem is therefore not a complete absence of collection or of an ecosystem.

The weakness seems to lie more between the moment the State knows and the moment the economy wins because of that knowledge. The United States has an exceptional capacity to align the White House, Pentagon, intelligence community, Treasury, Department of Commerce, universities, venture-capital funds, public procurement, export controls and large companies rapidly. China links industrial policy, financing, universities, companies, diplomacy and national priorities even more tightly. France possesses many of the same building blocks, but connects them less effectively. Parliamentary reports have for years described complex circuits, fragmented responsibilities, coordination problems and difficulty circulating useful information to companies.

This is probably where the deepest difference lies. The American advantage is not merely that an agency may know about a foreign project; it is that the information can quickly become an export-control decision, funding, a public contract, an investment restriction, an acquisition or a research priority. China’s advantage is not merely that a service can recruit an engineer; it is the capacity to integrate that intelligence into industrial policy that then finances laboratories, factories, suppliers and national champions. Intelligence is a multiplier of power, but it produces nothing if the industrial ecosystem cannot act.

That is also why it would be simplistic to tell the DGSE simply to “steal more secrets”. A plan is not a factory. A patent is not a supply chain. Information is not financing. No intelligence service can permanently compensate for unstable taxation, excessively expensive energy, lack of capital, interminable administrative delays or an inability to scale companies. A high-performing service can, however, help a country know before others where to invest, what to protect, whom to acquire, which risk to anticipate and which sector to accelerate. That is when intelligence becomes truly economic.

The offensive does not necessarily begin with a clandestine operation

A weakness in the French debate is that open intelligence and clandestine espionage are opposed too quickly. In reality, an offensive policy often begins long before a source is recruited or a computer system penetrated. Patents, scientific publications, job advertisements, tenders, trade fairs, machinery purchases, customs databases, regulatory filings, technical conferences, researchers’ publications and commercial imagery can already reconstruct a large part of a technology programme. A team able to combine these data can establish that a company is opening a production line, hiring heavily in a field, filing coherent patent families and suddenly securing certain suppliers. Without any secret information, it can infer an industrial trajectory and decide where scarce collection resources should be concentrated.

This logic is particularly important for France because it offers an offensive field with almost no diplomatic risk. An administration or specialised operator can map foreign critical technologies, identify the researchers who truly matter, follow the programmes that are progressing and detect companies that control indispensable building blocks. Clandestine intelligence then becomes far more targeted: rather than vaguely trying to discover “what China is doing” or “what America is preparing”, the State can concentrate rare capabilities on a handful of precise questions that open sources cannot answer.

The Directorate General of Armaments has itself developed OSINT capabilities, meaning intelligence derived from open sources. The 2025 parliamentary report on economic warfare refers to a reorganisation, an OSINT campus and a desire to adopt a more offensive posture. The evolution is revealing: the modern offensive is not necessarily spectacular. It consists first of reducing uncertainty faster than competitors and then deciding before they do. In a technology race in which a few months can be enough to lock in a standard or buy a startup, knowing earlier can be worth more than possessing a secret document.

Embassies, science diplomacy and strategic intelligence: France's network is broader than the DGSE

French economic intelligence is not limited to specialist services. France has long possessed a diplomatic, economic and scientific network abroad capable of producing a huge quantity of useful information. Economic attachés, scientific services, embassies, Business France, the Treasury, academic networks, defence advisers and specialist operators observe markets, technologies, regulatory change and local ecosystems. That collection is not espionage, but it can become strategic-intelligence raw material when information is cross-checked, prioritised and connected to national objectives.

The history of ADIT is instructive. Created in the early 1990s as a public body tasked with exploiting technological information collected abroad, including by scientific services in embassies, the Agence pour la diffusion de l’information technologique already embodied the idea that a modern State should help its economy understand what was developing elsewhere. It later became a major private strategic-intelligence group. The trajectory shows that France has a tradition of international monitoring and of converting information into economic support, even if it is less visible than American venture-capital culture or Chinese coordination.

The problem remains integration. An excellent scientific note is useless if it does not reach the right decision-maker. Commercial information from an embassy can lose its value if it circulates too slowly. A vulnerability signal detected by a service may be unusable if the company concerned is not cleared to receive it or if no mechanism exists to reformulate it. France therefore needs less to invent additional sensors than to improve the circuits that turn existing sensors into decisions. That is precisely what several public reports have been requesting for years.

SMEs and mid-sized companies: the most dangerous blind spot in technological sovereignty

Economic warfare does not target only large groups. A foreign power seeking French technology often has an incentive to bypass Airbus, Thales or Safran, which have strong security departments, and target the subcontractor that possesses a unique component and far fewer resources. A fifty-person SME may hold a surface-treatment process, embedded software, a sensor, a material or a specialised machine without having a full cyber team or an economic-security officer. It may also be more vulnerable to an equity investment, a flattering partnership proposal, the recruitment of two key engineers or financial dependence that pushes it toward a foreign investor.

Parliamentary work on the defence industrial and technological base highlights precisely this fragility. A very large share of incidents concerns SMEs even though they are indispensable to major programmes. The risk is twofold: losing the secret of a technology and losing the company itself. A foreign acquisition can legally transfer patents, contracts, teams and know-how without a single spy ever being involved. In some cases, the most effective economic warfare therefore does not look like a clandestine operation; it looks like a well-negotiated capital transaction.

That is why a French offensive doctrine should integrate SMEs and mid-sized companies much more directly. The State cannot send them classified information as if it were a newsletter. It can, however, produce derived intelligence, alerts, risk analyses, market maps, information about investors, warnings about certain approaches or indications of foreign technologies worth watching. It can also connect these companies with financial tools able to prevent a forced sale or support an acquisition abroad. Technological sovereignty is often decided inside companies the public has never heard of.

Why France cannot copy China, and why it must not remain naive

The idea “if they spy on us, let us do exactly the same” is attractive in its simplicity but unrealistic. France is a State governed by law, a member of the European Union and several alliances, whose companies depend on access to foreign markets and protection of intellectual property. An officially organised policy of systematically looting commercial secrets to redistribute them to national companies would carry major diplomatic, legal and commercial costs. It would also weaken the principles France invokes when defending its own firms.

That does not mean France should adopt a posture of pure innocence. French law itself recognises the promotion of major economic interests as a purpose of intelligence. The challenge is therefore to use clandestine capabilities when they serve a legitimate strategic objective, while massively developing forms of offensive action that do not rely on theft: company acquisitions, talent recruitment, regulatory influence, trade policy, patent exploitation, regulatory anticipation, economic diplomacy, protection against extraterritorial law and support for French acquisitions abroad.

The real difference with the Chinese model should therefore not be between an “aggressive” country and a “naïve” one. It should be between different regimes of power. France can defend an open economy and the rule of law while treating competitive intelligence, knowledge of competitors, protection of strategic sectors and technological anticipation as matters of national interest. The central question is not moral but strategic: are we using everything our law already allows us to use, and are we doing so quickly enough?

Three power models, three ways to win

China, the United States and France have neither the same size, the same economic structure nor the same political system. Comparing them as if they ought to use identical tools would therefore be misleading. China benefits from extremely strong state coordination and a gigantic domestic market. It can align industrial policy, finance, research, regulation, public procurement, companies and geopolitical objectives with continuity that Western democracies find difficult to reproduce. The United States has another advantage: the dollar, financial markets, investment funds, universities, large technology companies and global attraction of talent form an ecosystem capable of absorbing foreign innovation while strictly controlling access to technologies it considers sensitive.

France has a more fragmented architecture. It has capable intelligence services, major technology companies, a global diplomatic network, nuclear and space capabilities, high-level engineers, a scientific tradition and increasingly robust screening instruments. But it has neither American financial depth nor Chinese coordination. Its strategy must therefore be more selective. It cannot chase every technology; it must identify those that genuinely condition sovereignty and concentrate intelligence, financing, public purchasing, standards and acquisitions on them.

That selectivity can become an advantage if it is deliberate. A middle power does not need to master everything to remain sovereign; it needs to know which dependencies are acceptable and which are not. Economic intelligence can help make precisely that distinction. It can show that a sector advertised as strategic actually relies on a technology available from several allies, or conversely that an apparently ordinary component depends on a single supplier in a country capable of closing the market. Power then comes less from possessing every secret than from identifying the true points of dependency.

This comparison also shows why intelligence cannot be separated from domestic economic policy. A heavily indebted, undercapitalised French company that is blocked from expanding will remain vulnerable even if the DGSE knows perfectly what its competitors intend. Conversely, a solid, financed, protected and well-informed company can turn a modest analytical lead into a lasting industrial advantage. Intelligence does not replace the economy; it amplifies the strengths or weaknesses of the economy it serves.

Are we one war behind?

The answer to whether France is “one war behind” must be nuanced. On the legal capacity to conduct economic intelligence, France is not behind: the framework exists. On foreign human intelligence, it has a long tradition and a recognised service. On technical and cyber capabilities, it possesses important sovereign means and plans to strengthen the offensive side. On economic counter-interference, it has made substantial progress. On foreign-investment screening, the system has been strengthened. It would therefore be inaccurate to describe the French State as wholly incompetent or disarmed.

The comparison becomes less favourable when we consider integration as a whole. The United States simultaneously uses capital, regulation, intelligence, sanctions, standards, public procurement and diplomacy. China mobilises financing, research, companies, universities, services and industrial policy in a tightly coordinated system. France still acts too often in silos. This is not merely a political criticism; parliamentary documents themselves call for a more offensive posture, better coordination and more effective circulation of intelligence toward strategic companies.

It is therefore more accurate to speak of an incomplete exploitation doctrine than of an absence of offensive intelligence. France is probably not a war behind in its ability to know; it is still behind in its ability to make intelligence, finance, industry, standards, public procurement, trade policy and technology strategy work together. That linkage is what turns information into market share, an alert into a strategic acquisition, a weak signal into an investment decision and a technological lead into durable industry.

What would a genuinely offensive French doctrine look like?

A modern offensive doctrine should not use “steal more plans” as its slogan. It should begin with a far more useful question: which technologies will condition our sovereignty in ten, twenty or thirty years, and how can we know before others where they are emerging, who controls them, what they depend on and how France can position itself? From that map, economic-intelligence requirements should be defined at the highest level and then translated into industrial, financial, diplomatic and regulatory decisions.

Such a doctrine requires much more aggressive use of perfectly lawful tools: large-scale patent analysis, scientific publications, talent mapping, supply-chain monitoring, investment analysis, regulatory intelligence, standards monitoring, equity stakes, targeted acquisitions, recruitment of foreign researchers, technology partnerships and support for French companies seeking to buy strategic assets abroad. The 2025 parliamentary report specifically proposes improving detection of critical foreign technologies and helping French companies invest in strategic firms. That is already a form of offensive action.

When clandestine intelligence is legally authorised to protect or promote a fundamental national interest, it should not be treated as intellectually shameful. It must of course remain targeted, proportionate, controlled and compatible with France’s international obligations. But it would be paradoxical to invest billions in an intelligence community while, through culture or political fear, forbidding it from examining the technologies that will determine tomorrow’s economic and military power. Semiconductors, quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, batteries, space, robotics, biotechnology, nuclear technology, cryptography and power electronics are fields in which the boundary between national security and the economy has become almost impossible to draw.

Priority should also be given to strategic SMEs. Large groups already have security departments, cyber teams, lawyers, former security officials and international networks. A thirty-person SME may nevertheless possess the only French technology indispensable to an entire sector without any of those protections. Derived intelligence, alerts, risk analysis, international support and help identifying opportunities should reach such companies far more directly. The aim is not to turn SMEs into auxiliaries of the intelligence services; it is to ensure that knowledge accumulated by the State also becomes an advantage for those who create value and technology.

What we know, and what we do not know

The most honest answers are ultimately quite clear. Yes, France conducts economic intelligence and that mission is recognised by law, the CNCTR, parliamentary reports and public statements by the DGSE director. Yes, it has clandestine human-intelligence capabilities. Yes, it possesses offensive cyber capabilities and intends to strengthen them. Yes, the law allows international surveillance under certain conditions for purposes that include the Nation’s major economic, industrial and scientific interests. And yes, French history contains episodes of offensive industrial espionage directed at American companies.

What we do not know publicly is whether French agents are currently infiltrated inside the largest American or Chinese companies. We do not know which companies are operational DGSE targets. We do not know whether foreign corporate servers are penetrated to obtain technology secrets. There is no public evidence of a current mechanism directly transmitting stolen plans or industrial secrets to French companies. Claiming otherwise without a source would confuse what the services are capable of doing with what they do in a particular operation.

What we do know may be more important: France has the legal framework, the history, the means and a doctrine moving toward a more offensive stance. Public reports simultaneously acknowledge that the posture remains too defensive and that coordination with industry needs to improve. The main question is therefore no longer whether offensive economic intelligence exists in France, but whether it is integrated strongly enough into a genuine national strategy of power.

France probably knows more than it converts into results

France is not a country without intelligence services, an offensive tradition or technical capabilities. It has a DGSE able to produce economic intelligence, domestic services able to protect companies, offensive cyber capabilities, a law that explicitly authorises promotion of major economic interests and a history in which industrial espionage has already been acknowledged. The claim that “the State does nothing” therefore does not withstand public evidence.

But the opposite claim would be equally misleading. Nothing publicly establishes that France currently operates a systematic policy of technological looting, infiltrates the biggest American or Chinese companies and redistributes their secrets to French industry. Operations are secret, precise objectives are not published and exploitation of raw intelligence is deliberately compartmented. The picture available to citizens is of a State able to collect, protect, analyse and sometimes act offensively, yet whose own reports still question how to turn that knowledge into economic power.

That is probably where the most serious French delay lies. China and the United States do not win only because they know more. They win because they connect information, industry, capital, policy, standards, markets and technology more effectively. France has sensors, engineers, companies, services and a legal framework. The question is now less whether France has spies than whether the State can make all of these assets work together so that intelligence becomes investment, innovation, acquisitions, exports and jobs.

In twenty-first-century economic warfare, information is a raw material. It replaces neither the factory nor the researcher, but it can decide where to build one and how to protect the other. A genuinely offensive French doctrine could therefore be expressed in one sentence: know before others what will matter, then be capable of acting before they do. If France wants to remain an industrial power, the issue is less romanticism about secret services than national organisation. We have the sensors. Political debate begins when we decide what to do with what they tell us.

Direct answers to the central questions

Does France conduct economic intelligence? Yes. The law, the CNCTR, parliamentary reports and public DGSE statements demonstrate that it does.

Does France possess clandestine human-intelligence and offensive cyber capabilities? Yes. Those capabilities are publicly acknowledged, even though their precise targets are classified.

Are French agents currently infiltrated inside major American or Chinese companies? There is no public evidence allowing that claim to be made about any specific company.

Do French services hack foreign corporate servers in order to hand the secrets obtained to French industry? No current system of that kind has been publicly demonstrated.

Has France historically conducted offensive industrial espionage? Yes. Operations have been publicly documented, and Pierre Marion acknowledged creating a dedicated structure in the early 1980s.

Is France behind? Less in intelligence capability than in the integration of intelligence, industry, finance, standards, trade policy and speed of decision.

Main public sources

The references below are prioritised because they are legal, institutional, parliamentary or judicial sources, or specialist intelligence reporting. Each link points to the original public source used for the French master article.

1. French Internal Security Code, Article L. 811-3: purposes of intelligence - open source
2. CNCTR: public presentation of lawful intelligence purposes - open source
3. French Internal Security Code, Article L. 854-1: international communications - open source
4. WIPO: Global Innovation Index 2025 - open source
5. WIPO: PCT statistics 2025 - open source
6. US Department of Justice: sentencing of Yanjun Xu - open source
7. Intelligence Online: Chinese operations against Western aerospace - open source
8. Intelligence Online: French investigation into Beijing’s acquisition of aviation expertise - open source
9. Intelligence Online: LinkedIn scheme attributed to the Guoanbu - open source
10. Intelligence Online: suspected espionage near Toulouse - open source
11. White House: National Science and Technology Security Strategy 2026 - open source
12. US Treasury: CFIUS activity in 2025 - open source
13. ODNI: Office of Economic Security and Emerging Technologies - open source
14. Le Monde: how the NSA spies on France - open source
15. European Parliament: report on ECHELON - open source
16. Le Monde: Pierre Marion and DGSE industrial espionage - open source
17. Le Monde: the economic shadow war between allies - open source
18. French National Assembly: 2018 report on economic-interest intelligence - open source
19. French Senate: 2025 Parliamentary Intelligence Delegation conference - open source
20. French National Assembly: 2025 budget documents on DGSE resources - open source
21. SGDSN: 2025 update of the National Strategic Review - open source
22. French Ministry of the Armed Forces: offensive computer operations - open source
23. DGSE: institutional presentation - open source
24. Intelligence Online: DGSE and economic security - open source
25. Intelligence Online: DGSE rapprochement with the private sector - open source
26. French Directorate-General for Enterprise: 2023 annual report - open source
27. French National Assembly: 2025 report on economic warfare - open source
28. French National Assembly: 2025 work on threats to the defence industrial base - open source
29. French National Assembly: history of ADIT and international technology monitoring - open source
30. Bpifrance: presentation of the ADIT group in 2025 - open source