Leaked documents expose China's AI-powered surveillance and influence network targeting Taiwan

A trove of internal documents leaked from GoLaxy (中科天璣), a Beijing-based data and artificial intelligence firm, has revealed a sophisticated foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) system designed to surveil Taiwanese politicians, track public sentiment during elections, and run coordinated influence campaigns intended to fracture Taiwanese society.

The documents, totalling 399 pages, were originally discovered by researchers Brett J. Goldstein and Brett V. Benson and first reported publicly by The New York Times on 5 August 2025.

They are now preserved at Vanderbilt University's National Security Institute.

The materials were subsequently compiled and analysed by Taipei-based civil society research organisation Doublethink Lab, whose findings detail the scope and intent of GoLaxy's operations.

GoLaxy was spun off from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT CAS). Its core product, described in the leaked materials as the "GoPro Intelligent Propaganda System," is presented as a comprehensive solution for what the documents frame as China's need to win narrative battles against Western-led information operations.

Scale of data collection

The database at the centre of GoLaxy's Taiwan-targeting operations is extensive.

According to the Doublethink Lab analysis, it contains 170 detailed profile files on Taiwanese politicians, approximately 23 million household registration records sourced from closed databases, data on 75 registered political parties, records for 1,478 companies, information on more than 13,000 religious organisations, and entries covering nearly 24,000 civic associations.

Individual politician profiles compile party affiliation, employment history, birthplace, residence, education, religious background and a narrative biography. High-profile figures catalogued include President William Lai (賴清德), former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), among many others across executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Beyond individuals, the system incorporates a "Taiwan knowledge graph" linking political parties to their founders, leadership, ideology, contact coordinates and an explicit field recording each party's "attitude toward China."

The graph is structured to allow automated queries, such as identifying which "pan-green" politicians lead anti-China campaigns in specific localities, or which "pan-blue" figures hold institutional choke points.

The GoPro system and its four pillars

The leaked pitch materials, apparently prepared by the GoLaxy team for senior Chinese Academy of Sciences leadership, describe GoPro as resting on four operational pillars.

The first is "intelligent perception of political conditions," in which the system aggregates daily political events across platforms, analyses narrative heat and trend lines, and monitors the political stance and sentiment of major media and social media accounts.

The second is "intelligent target identification," drawing on what the documents describe as ten-plus years of intelligence analysis. The system claims to have filtered 180,000 Hong Kong Twitter users to identify approximately 3,000 key actors and more than 100 opinion leaders during the period surrounding Hong Kong's national security legislation.

The third is "intelligent generation of immersive content," using AI-assisted tools to produce text, rewrite drafts in multiple stylistic variations, cross-reference source material, and synthesise long-form content tailored to specific target audiences.

The fourth is "intelligent distribution in uncontrolled environments," in which hundreds of humanised bot accounts across Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and other platforms are coordinated through a central dashboard to publish, comment and repost automatically at scale.

The documents acknowledge that account farming — building convincing fake personas at volume without triggering platform detection — remains a bottleneck. GoLaxy's response is a detailed evasion methodology, including a "one person, one device, one account cluster" approach, the use of international phone numbers and proxy IP addresses, and standardised operating procedures calibrated by account type and current status.

Election monitoring and divisive framing

A "Taiwan Online Public Opinion Weekly Report" included in the leaked materials, dated to the period of 25 November to 1 December 2023, tracked 634,448 items of online content in the weeks before Taiwan's January 2024 presidential and legislative elections.

The report analysed competing narratives among the presidential campaigns of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People's Party (TPP), and tracked spikes in media exposure for Ko, then-KMT presidential candidate Hou You-yi (侯友宜) and his running mate Jaw Shaw-kang (趙少康). It also assessed how the DPP shaped public opinion through debates over the cross-strait service trade agreement.

Separately, a profiling project described in the documents aimed to collect at least 50,000 Taiwan-related news articles and categorise the individuals mentioned into four groups: hardliner, friendly, swing and objective. Each category was to contain at least 1,000 key personnel, enabling their direct association with divisive campaigns.

A parallel project outlined plans to simulate the preferences, cognition and language styles of target audiences and generate at least 100 virtual personas capable of interacting in Mandarin, Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and English across ten scripted scenarios using text, photographs, audio and video.

Clients and partners

A project overview on page 379 of the leaked documents lists GoLaxy's active clients, including the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the Central Military Commission Science and Technology Commission (CMC STC), PLA Unit 61716 (also known as the 311 Base in Fuzhou, responsible for overseeing psychological operations targeting Taiwan), and the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO).

Among GoLaxy's disclosed partners, two have already been placed on the United States government's Entity List. Xiamen Meiya Pico Information Security Research Institute, a state-controlled cybersecurity firm, was listed in October 2019 for its role in facilitating human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Hefei iFlytek Digital Technology, a subsidiary of the partially state-owned artificial intelligence company iFlytek, was listed the same month on identical grounds. Other named partners include subsidiaries of Baidu, which the US Pentagon indicated in November 2025 it was considering adding to its Chinese military company list.

Broader targeting scope

The documents indicate that GoLaxy's surveillance architecture extends well beyond Taiwan. Comparable monitoring frameworks are described for Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, framing their populations through security and counter-terrorism lenses.

A Belt and Road Initiative module targets political elites, military structures and public sentiment across more than a dozen countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Central Asia.

A dedicated United States elections template, configured as a dashboard, aggregates data on all members of the 117th Congress, more than 4,000 political figures, 5,000 journalists, 1,000 academic experts, 10,000 researchers and approximately 20,000 US companies, including specific military units and research institutions.

Doublethink Lab researchers identified four social media accounts they assess with confidence to be operated by GoLaxy, citing the fact that two were followed or friended by GoLaxy engineers whose names and photographs appear elsewhere in the documents. Three of the four accounts have been archived; one remained active at the time of the report's publication.

The Doublethink Lab report concludes that the GoLaxy documents confirm China's reliance on commercial technology companies — rather than military or intelligence agencies operating alone — to conduct its FIMI operations, and that this creates openings for sanctions and further investigation by the research community.