The Chinese government is using companies with expertise in artificial intelligence to monitor and manipulate public opinion, giving it a new weapon in information warfare, according to current and former U.S. officials and documents unearthed by researchers.
One company’s internal documents show how it has undertaken influence campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans.
While the firm has not mounted a campaign in the United States, American spy agencies have monitored its activity for signs that it might try to influence American elections or political debates, former U.S. officials said.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly the new frontier of espionage and malign influence operations, allowing intelligence services to conduct campaigns far faster, more efficiently and on a larger scale than ever before.
The Chinese government has long struggled to mount information operations targeting other countries, lacking the aggressiveness or effectiveness of Russian intelligence agencies. But U.S. officials and experts say that advances in A.I. could help China overcome its weaknesses.
A new technology can track public debates of interest to the Chinese government, offering the ability to monitor individuals and their arguments as well as broader public sentiment. The technology also has the promise of mass-producing propaganda that can counter shifts in public opinion at home and overseas.
China’s emerging capabilities come as the U.S. government pulls back efforts to counter foreign malign influence campaigns.
U.S. spy agencies still collect information about foreign manipulation, but the Trump administration has dismantled the teams at the State Department, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that warned the public about potential threats. In the last presidential election, the campaigns included Russian videos denigrating Vice President Kamala Harris and falsely claiming that ballots had been destroyed.
The new technology allows the Chinese company GoLaxy, to go beyond the election influence campaigns undertaken by Russia in recent years, according to the documents.
It is not clear from the documents how effective GoLaxy’s campaigns in Taiwan, Hong Kong and inside China have been, or whether its technology can do all that it promises.
In a statement, GoLaxy denied that it was creating any sort of “bot network or psychological profiling tour” or that it had done any work related to Hong Kong or other elections. It called the information presented by The New York Times about the company “misinformation.”
“GoLaxy’s products are mainly based on open-source data, without specially collecting data targeting U.S. officials,” the firm said.
After being contacted by The Times, GoLaxy began altering its website, removing references to its national security work on behalf of the Chinese government.
The documents examined by researchers appear to have been leaked by a disgruntled employee upset about wages and working conditions at the company. While most of the documents are not dated, the majority of those that include dates are from 2020, 2022 and 2023. They were obtained by Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security, a nonpartisan research and educational center that studies cybersecurity, intelligence and other critical challenges.
Publicly, GoLaxy advertises itself as a firm that gathers data and analyzes public sentiment for Chinese companies and the government. But in the documents, which were reviewed by The Times, the company privately claims that it can use a new technology to reshape and influence public opinion on behalf of the Chinese government.
The company explains how precisely it can aim its efforts at individual social media and internet users by using a technology called the Smart Propaganda System, or GoPro.
The Vanderbilt researchers Brett J. Goldstein and Brett V. Benson revealed the existence of the documents in a guest essay for The New York Times Opinion section, arguing that GoLaxy is able to mine social media profiles and then create content that can produce customized content that “feels authentic, adapts in real-time and avoids detection.” The result, they said, is a “propaganda engine” that can generate far more material than seen before.
“A.I.-driven propaganda is no longer a hypothetical future threat,” they wrote. “It is operational, sophisticated and already reshaping how public opinion can be manipulated on a large scale.”
Experts say the firm is rapidly adopting China’s advanced artificial intelligence technologies, which, according to the internal company documents, should allow GoLaxy to undertake influence operations that are far more sophisticated than foreign governments have previously been able to conduct.
In traditional influence operations — think Russia’s social media efforts in 2016 to spread chaos in the United States — disinformation had to be made piece by piece. Automated bots could amplify certain messages, but countries like Russia needed to build troll farms, operations using dozens or hundreds of people, to write fake posts, sometimes in halting English. The disinformation the troll farms could spread was limited.
GoLaxy’s technology has the potential to upend the influence business.
Just as artificial intelligence can help American high school students instantly write out hard-to-tell-they-are-fake papers for their classes, foreign governments can use the new technology to create far more believable propaganda on a far greater scale.
According to the documents, GoLaxy’s new technology has the promise to automatically track broad swings in public opinion, as well as the arguments of specific influential individuals.
GoLaxy’s public-facing platform, according to its website, has begun using DeepSeek, an advanced artificial intelligence model developed by a Chinese company. GoLaxy can quickly craft responses that reinforce the Chinese government’s views and counter opposing arguments. Once put into use, such posts could drown out organic debate with propaganda.
The company can collect data from an array of Chinese and Western social media companies. According to the documents, it brings in tens of millions of pieces of data, including posts and user data, from Weibo, a popular social media platform, 1.8 million articles per day from WeChat, four million social media posts from X and 10,000 Facebook posts, all to amass and refine profiles on individuals.
The company is searching for political commentary that bolsters views that Beijing supports and also develops messaging to counter opinions the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stamp out. That has included criticism of China’s Covid policies, opposition to China’s increasing control over Hong Kong, and support for the ruling party of Taiwan, according to the internal company documents.
GoPro “already possesses the ability to be aware of political situations, target in real time, create high-quality content and perform rapid counterattacks,” the company says, adding that the new system “has already produced certain political effects in relevant state departments.”
The company, according to documents, has done work for China’s intelligence, including the Ministry of State Security — the country’s main spy agency — and internal security agencies.
Former U.S. officials said that American spy agencies had information confirming those partnerships.
The company’s work, according to current and former American officials, is aligned with China’s national security strategy, an assessment that the documents buttress.
Evoking a phrase used by Mao Zedong, the company suggests that its technology will be essential to help China prevail over the West.
The GoPro system, the company says, will become a “technological platform that can truly tell China’s story, amplify China’s voice and expand China’s influence, as well as providing comprehensive technological support to quickly make ‘the easterly wind overpowering the westerly wind.’”
James Mulvenon, who has studied Chinese information operations, said that GoLaxy had been gathering huge amounts of data on potential targets of the Chinese state and using artificial intelligence to develop new propaganda tools.
“GoLaxy is an incredibly important company,” said Mr. Mulvenon, who is also the chief intelligence officer at Pamir Consulting, which analyzes risks for businesses in China. “It is deeply tied into the Chinese government’s security apparatus and the military. They are building new tools that are proposing to do a better job at information operations.”
GoLaxy appears to have focused most of its efforts on collecting information on the Chinese population, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan.
But it claims in a document that it has assembled virtual profiles on 117 current and former members of Congress, including Representatives Byron Donalds of Florida, Chip Roy of Texas and Andy Biggs of Arizona. All of the representatives listed in the documents obtained by the Vanderbilt researchers were Republicans, though it is likely that the firm also collected information on Democrats.
In addition, according to the documents, GoLaxy tracks and collects information on more than 2,000 American political and public figures, 4,000 right-wing influencers and supporters of President Trump, in addition to journalists, scholars and entrepreneurs.
The documents do not show how detailed the data on American politicians might be, nor does GoLaxy say what it is doing with the information. But U.S. officials have long claimed that China tracks American politicians’ policy positions on issues of importance to Beijing.
Former U.S. officials said that while China tried to meddle in some local elections in 2024, it stayed largely on the sidelines of the presidential vote, and the U.S. saw no evidence that GoLaxy conducted influence operations in the United States.
The Chinese government may not direct GoLaxy’s day-to-day activities, but current and former officials say there is little doubt that the firm’s information operations are endorsed by the Chinese government and that the Communist Party has ultimate control over the firm.
Sugon, a state-controlled super computing company that is on the U.S. government’s export black list, is an investor. And GoLaxy was founded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a state-owned institution, according to GoLaxy’s website and the documents.
“The company publicly says they are developing generative A.I. capabilities for national strategic missions,” said Jimmy Goodrich, a China researcher and senior adviser to the RAND Corporation for technology analysis. “This is an extension of a state institution.”
In its statement GoLaxy said that it was a “purely independent commercial enterprise that is not affiliated with any government agency or organization.”
During China’s Covid lockdown, GoLaxy tried to amplify Elon Musk’s praise of the Chinese government’s pandemic policies to rebut Western criticism and boost public support for Beijing’s “Zero Covid” policy, according to the documents. Those efforts used fake Facebook accounts much like Russian troll farms . It did not seem to have made much difference. Public opposition eventually forced the Chinese government to change its policy.
The firm also tracked people in Hong Kong as it sought to counter opposition to the 2020 Hong Kong National Security Law. According to the documents, GoLaxy identified some 180,000 different Twitter accounts, then pushed out narratives that minimized the public’s dissent over the law, which expanded Chinese control of Hong Kong and eroded civil rights.
For China, the next intensive information battle came in the 2024 Taiwanese election, when China sought to undermine Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, which Beijing saw as pro-independence.
In December 2023, GoLaxy recommended specific messages that the company or others could push to exploit differences in Taiwanese public opinion, according to the documents. The effort appeared to be a way to mobilize resources to mount specific information campaigns, according to the documents.
It is not clear from the documents whether GoLaxy used GoPro to automatically generate and distribute targeted propaganda.
Former officials and experts are divided over whether the effort was effective. The Democratic Progressive Party remains in control, but its position was weakened.
The documents also briefly mention that the firm collected information about U.S. Navy warships near Taiwan. But there are no details, and the information could simply have been culled from social media and other data available to the public.
“The question is whether the Chinese can actually do the things they say they can,” Mr. Mulvenon said. “Information operations are harder than they sound. There are not a lot of good examples of success.”