If you were Chinese intelligence you'd surly reqruit a lot of people in us colleges and make sure they got hired into firms working on this stuff.

But, if you're a nation state, I'm sure just throwing money at the open market will work too. I'm sure that for every company that refuse defence contracts, there are a number that will hapilly build a pink fluffy-looking drone with built in facial recognition, 250 grams of explosives and a proximity fuse. Or, just be willing to sell surveillance tech to authorative governments.