No they are prate militia. They just try to disrupt your expansion. You do need to capture them to profit from them.....

ok it looke like they own them gess i was rong.

p.s. thanks

They don't have research per see. But they do get hull, weapon, shield upgrades. I think those depend on time of the game or number of raids which is more or less same thing until they max out what was allocated to them by parameters somewhere in code.

In diplomacy they do get cap ship stats regarding hull and weapons and sb equivalent stats for armor.

but late in game they are stronger...

Take a look at the GameInfo\Gameplay.constraints about half way down for Pirate Raid info. Each raid allows more research and has more weight. You can also look at GameInfo\PlayerPirate.entity and see there pretty well the same as TEC

Pirate raid severity is also affected on how many ships (particularly trade/refinery ships) and structures all the players have built. As the number of these ships and structures rise, the strength of pirate raids also increases. Simply expanding/developing your empire raises the strength of pirate raids.

If that's the case, then they'll be sitting at their base fat and happy until you bug them.