International Business Machines Corp has agreed to let China review some product source code in a secure room, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing two people briefed on the practice.
It was not clear which products IBM was allowing reviews of or how much time officials of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology can spend looking at the code, the WSJ said on Friday.
U.S. tech companies have been facing increased pressure from Chinese authorities to accept rigorous security checks before their products may be purchased by China’s sprawling, state-run financial institutions.
“IBM does not provide government access to client data or back doors into our technology,” the company said in an emailed statement to Reuters on Friday.
The company said that in several countries it can conduct limited demonstrations of specific aspects of its technology in “highly secure, controlled IBM environments that have no external communication links”.