NPR’s months-long examination of the attack — based on interviews with dozens of players from company officials to cyber forensics experts to U.S. intelligence officials — found that stealing emails and intellectual property may only have been the beginning. Officials believe that the breach was in the service of something bigger: China’s artificial intelligence ambitions. The Beijing leadership aims to lead the world in a technology that allows computers to perform tasks that traditionally required human intelligence — such as finding patterns and recognizing speech or faces.

“There is a long-term project underway,” said Kiersten Todt, who was the executive director of the Obama administration’s bipartisan commission on cybersecurity and now runs the Cyber Readiness Institute. “We don’t know what the Chinese are building, but what we do know is that diversity of data, quality of data aggregation, accumulation of data is going to be critical to its success.”