A Chinese company has been trying to develop artificial intelligence-powered technology that would enable authoritarian governments to not just monitor dissidents but also potentially predict who could become one in the future.

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 Chinese company, Geedge Networks, sells 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.

But according to leaked company documents, the firm is 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, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University.

Such technology, if perfected, would give authoritarian governments a powerful tool to use against perceived enemies.

The idea that an authoritarian government would use artificial intelligence to suppress dissent is troubling enough. But the use of A.I. to predict dissent well before a person has taken action has become a nightmare scenario, according to some involved in the industry.

“This is what happens when mass surveillance meets A.I.,” said Brett J. Goldstein, the director of the Wicked Problems Lab at Vanderbilt’s Institute of National Security. “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 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 A.I. to highlight who may pose a political risk.

But the company’s progress appears to have been hampered by Biden-era export controls on U.S.-designed computer chips that power artificial intelligence. That suggests that U.S. restrictions may have slowed China’s development of the next generation of surveillance technology.

Documents from Geedge show that in 2024, when tough U.S. export controls on China were in place, the company and its lab struggled to find enough computing power for surveillance technology.

Brett V. Benson, a political science professor at Vanderbilt, said the documents refer to GPU limitations. GPUs — graphic processing units — are the chips that power A.I. models. As a result of the limitations, he said, the company began using older, less powerful A.I. models and chips.

Today, Geedge has access to enough graphic processing units for its current products, according to U.S. officials. But to carry out the most ambitious version of its predictive technology, the company would probably need more advanced chips than China can acquire, the officials said.

Former Biden administration officials said intelligence showed that their policies restricting China from high-end, U.S.-designed chips had worked at keeping the U.S. artificial intelligence edge and at slowing the development of other Chinese technology.

But whether U.S. export controls will slow China’s development of more oppressive uses of artificial intelligence is an open question.

The Trump administration has weakened some of the Biden-era export controls and kept restrictions on the most advanced processors from Nvidia, the U.S. company that designs the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence chips. During President Trump’s recent trip to Beijing, U.S. officials said that China would have access to a more advanced version of the Nvidia chips.

But China is trying to wean its artificial intelligence companies off U.S.-designed chips, so that export controls can no longer constrain their ambitions.

Profiling Future Critics

The new information was gleaned from a trove of data, including 100,000 documents from Geedge that were originally posted last September. Working with the documents, Wired and other publications have outlined how Geedge exported its network security software to countries including Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Myanmar and Pakistan, enabling them to conduct mass surveillance on mobile networks.

Vanderbilt researchers scouring the documents focused not on the technology Geedge was selling, but the next generation of technology it was trying to develop, as well as the constraints that could prevent it from putting the strategy into effect.

In the first months of 2024, according to the Geedge documents, the company’s researchers were working to develop behavioral profiles of people based on telecommunications, social media and location data. A.I. models were used to classify people and to “detect harmful information,” often a euphemism used by the Chinese Community Party to identify political dissent or other material the government wants suppressed.

In one meeting on Feb. 5, 2024, researchers discussed how to build profiles of people to “identify their intent” and “achieve discovery of harmful information,” according to minutes of the meeting.

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.

“Geedge’s research team was doing more than just documenting behavioral patterns. They were trying to predict what citizens might do next and with whom,” Mr. Benson 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.”

Geedge did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents suggest that the company’s team was working to link the physical movements with other online activity, including what movies people watched and what books they read, according to the Vanderbilt researchers.

Geedge’s research was in some ways similar to work by another Chinese company with ties to the state, GoLaxy. Last year, Vanderbilt and The New York Times outlined GoLaxy’s efforts to develop artificial intelligence-powered software that would push targeted propaganda — themes supported by the Chinese government and against views that Beijing opposed.

In some ways, Geedge’s work also evokes the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” in which the government predicts who may commit a crime, and a specialized police unit moves to arrest people before a violation occurs. While seen as infallible, the “precogs” who predict the future in the movie wrongly accuse the main character, played by the actor Tom Cruise, of a murder.

China has been pursuing predictive surveillance technology for years. But as the Geedge documents show, artificial intelligence models have sped the development of such tools.

And Geedge shows how predictive policing technology could soon become a Chinese export.

Fine-Tuning a Surveillance State

While the documents do not cover recent months, there is no evidence that Geedge has finalized or deployed the predictive technology, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive assessments.

But officials acknowledged that Chinese firms were working toward such technology to fine-tune their surveillance state. And China’s Public Security Bureaus have been racing to use DeepSeek, the country’s leading artificial intelligence model, to pursue other predictive policing technology, according to experts and government officials.

U.S. officials 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.