The Lawfare Podcast Scaling Laws: The GoLaxy Revelations: China's AI-Driven Influence Operations, with Brett Goldstein, Brett Benson, and Renée DiResta
Oct 31, 2025
In this discussion, Renée DiResta, an expert on influence operations, Brett Goldstein, a national security advisor, and Brett Benson, a political science professor, delve into the groundbreaking findings from the GoLaxy documents. They explore how AI has transformed influence operations, creating intricate psychological profiles for targeted messaging. The conversation reveals China's sophisticated 'Smart Propaganda System,' its ties to state intelligence, and the challenges in measuring its impact on events like the Hong Kong protests. They also tackle the implications for U.S. cybersecurity and the need for proactive strategies.
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AI Removes Old Detection Tells
- Early influence ops used human operators with detectable slips in language and behavior.
- Large language models remove many of those tells, making detection much harder.
Multimodal Personas Amplify Persuasion
- Multimodal generation (text, images, audio, chatbots) creates immersive fake identities at scale.
- That combination raises the long-term impact of persona-based persuasion over simple flooding.
Late-Night Discovery Of The GoLaxy Cache
- Brett Goldstein found a 399-page Mandarin cache and built a local LLM to translate it overnight.
- He then recruited Brett Benson to deeply analyze Golaxy's architecture and targets.