The US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has released a statement saying that Chinese engineers are no longer working on the Department of Defense's (DoD) Microsoft-based cloud.

In a video published on X, Hegseth criticized an "Obama Biden-era legacy program" that allowed Microsoft to use Chinese coders remotely supervised by US contractors to support DoD cloud systems for "nearly a decade."

He added regarding his thoughts on the program that, while it was designed to comply with contracting rules, "It exposed the department to unacceptable risk. I mean, if you're thinking America-first and common sense, this doesn't pass either of those tests."

The program, dubbed Digital Escorts, was uncovered in July 2025 in an investigation by non-profit journalism outlet ProPublica. Secretary Hegseth ordered an immediate review into this at the time.

The video published by Hegseth aimed to give the US public some insight into the "initial findings."

"It's over," he said. "We've issued a formal letter of concern to Microsoft documenting this breach of trust, and we're requiring a third-party audit of Microsoft's digital escort program, including the code and the submissions by Chinese nationals. This audit will be free of charge for US taxpayers. I'm also tasking the Department of Defense experts with a separate investigation of the digital escort program and the Chinese Microsoft employees that were involved in it."

Among the findings the investigations aim to uncover is whether the Chinese contractors "put anything in the code that we [the US gov] didn't know about." They will further find out if there is any other Chinese involvement in DoD systems.

Hegseth added: "It blows my mind that I'm even saying these things in such common sense that we ever allowed it to happen. That's why we're attacking it so hard. We expect vendors doing business with the Department of Defense to put US national security ahead of profit maximization."

When ProPublica first published the investigation, there seemed to be uncertainty around how aware the US government was of the program.

Microsoft told ProPublica that the government was aware of the business model, but Deven King, spokesperson for the Defense Information Systems Agency, told the publication: “Literally no one seems to know anything about this, so I don’t know where to go from here.”

Microsoft has long provided cloud computing services to the US government, including the DoD.

Microsoft was previously awarded the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract that was set to last for 10 years in 2019, though this was later canceled.

The cloud giant was one of four winners of the replacement to JEDI - the $9bn Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract (JWCC).