(TibetanReview.net, Jun02’26) – The Communist Party of China (CPC) wants to be the country’s sole governing power forever and a Chinese company has been trying to develop artificial intelligence-powered technology that would enable it and other authoritarian governments to not just monitor existing dissidents but also predict citizens who could become ones in the future, reported the nytimes.com Jun 1.
The work, which appears to be in the research stage, is ripped out of dystopian science fiction, offering a glimpse of a world in which an authoritarian state is able to move against its citizens before they begin any public dissent, the report said.
The company, Geedge Networks, is stated to already sell a commercial version of the Great Firewall, the surveillance and censorship software that China uses to control online activity. Those tools allow governments to monitor internet traffic and flag when someone tries to get around traditional internet censorship.
Geedge is found to have exported its network security software to countries including Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Myanmar and Pakistan, enabling them to conduct mass surveillance on mobile networks.
The company is now said to be working on new products that use artificial intelligence to examine location data and internet use to predict who could do or say something critical of the government, the report said, citing researchers at Vanderbilt University.
The idea that an authoritarian government would use artificial intelligence to suppress dissent is troubling enough. But the use of AI to predict dissent well before a person has taken action has become a nightmare scenario, some of those who are involved in the industry have been cited as saying.
“This is what happens when mass surveillance meets AI,” Brett J Goldstein, the director of the Wicked Problems Lab at Vanderbilt’s Institute of National Security, has said. “Without checks and balances, what China is doing to its own citizens is a preview of what becomes possible anywhere these tools go unchecked.”
The Vanderbilt researchers have found that Geedge, working with its government-supported research arm, MESA Lab, was developing technology that would generate profiles of Chinese citizens and then use AI to highlight who may pose a political risk.
Currently, the company’s progress appears to have been hampered by Biden-era export controls on US-designed computer chips that power artificial intelligence. That suggests that US restrictions may have slowed China’s development of the next generation of surveillance technology, the report said.
For now, Geedge has access to enough graphic processing units for its current products. But to carry out the most ambitious version of its predictive technology, the company would probably need more advanced chips than China can acquire, US officials have said.
Nevertheless, whether US export controls will slow China’s development of more oppressive uses of artificial intelligence is an open question, the report said.
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The Vanderbilt researchers have found that in the first months of 2024, Geedge’s researchers were working to develop behavioural profiles of people based on telecommunications, social media and location data. AI models were used to classify people and to “detect harmful information,” often a euphemism used by the CPC to identify political dissent or other material the government wants suppressed.
Minutes of a Feb 5, 2024 were stated to show that the company’s researchers discussed how to build profiles of people to “identify their intent” and “achieve discovery of harmful information.”
The Geedge researchers appeared to be developing tools to use artificial intelligence to predict who could become critics of the Chinese government, based on the data patterns the company’s surveillance technology collected, the report said.
“Geedge’s research team was doing more than just documenting behavioural patterns. They were trying to predict what citizens might do next and with whom,” Brett J Goldstein, the director of the Wicked Problems Lab at Vanderbilt’s Institute of National Security, has said. “Those stockpiles of data on ordinary materials are raw materials for generating profiles that determine who you are and what you will do next.”
Chinese firms have been working toward such predictive technology to fine-tune their surveillance state. Already, China’s Public Security Bureaus have been racing to use DeepSeek, the country’s leading artificial intelligence model, to pursue other predictive policing technology, experts and government officials have said.
US officials have said that Geedge and other Chinese surveillance companies probably have enough computing power for their current-generation tools. But predictive tools, particularly if the company eventually incorporates intercepted phone calls or surveillance video, could come up against constraints on computing power.
“Chinese security services are dealing with an overload of data,” Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, has said. “They have too much information at once. The real value of artificial intelligence is that they can triage the data and find the threats. But their ability to scale that depends on their access to compute. This is what makes export controls so important.”