AI Is Lowering the Barriers to China’s Information Warfare Against Japan

Japan’s Ministry of Defense recently released its 2026 Defense of Japan white paper, once again drawing attention to China’s rapid advances in artificial intelligence and their implications for the regional security environment. Yet the most immediate danger to Japan may not come from AI’s application to conventional military systems. Generative AI is also lowering the barriers for Chinese information operations targeting Japanese society. In late 2025, Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae made comments in the Diet linking a Taiwan contingency to Japan’s own security. Since then, disinformation targeting Japanese political figures and domestic issues has grown – not only in volume but also in sophistication. Research by organizations including the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and OpenAI suggests that China-linked influence operators are increasingly using AI to adapt their activities to Japan’s online environment and improve the efficiency of their operations. AI is beginning to erode what was once one of the most obvious weaknesses of Chinese information operations against Japan: the linguistic and cultural barrier. Content that once featured grammatical mistakes, awkward translations and unnatural expressions is becoming harder for ordinary users to identify at a glance. If these capabilities are deployed to interfere with elections, discredit politicians or amplify social divisions, their effects could extend far beyond any single piece of false information. A special report by Nikkei in February found that more than 400 China-linked social media accounts spread negative content about Takaichi during Japan’s House of Representatives election. Separately, the Yomiuri Shimbun, citing research by Japan Nexus Intelligence, reported that under a different set of criteria, thousands of coordinated accounts on X were involved in sharing and amplifying related content. The narratives did not focus solely on attacking Takaichi personally. They also linked Japan’s efforts to strengthen its defense capabilities with concerns over social welfare, seeking to promote the argument that military expansion was coming at the expense of ordinary people. In the past, such accounts often left obvious clues. Some had been created only recently. Their Japanese reflected Chinese word order and linguistic habits, while others mixed simplified Chinese characters with Japanese usage. AI-generated images also frequently contained visual errors that made them relatively easy to identify. Those weaknesses, however, are becoming less pronounced. The Sankei Shimbun has continued to track PAPERWALL, a China-linked information network that includes 15 websites masquerading as Japanese news outlets. The continued operation of these sites, and the broader ecosystem surrounding them, points toward an increasingly localized approach to influence operations. Improvements in language, imagery, and the appearance of fake news sites are making it more difficult for ordinary readers to distinguish legitimate sources from fabricated ones. A report released by OpenAI in February offered another important clue. The company found that China-linked actors had used ChatGPT to assist in planning an online influence campaign targeting Takaichi. Influence actors appear willing to incorporate different AI systems into their existing workflows whenever those tools make their operations more effective. What matters is not the nationality of the model. What matters is that generative AI is reducing the cost of cross-language information operations. In the past, producing large volumes of content tailored to a Japanese audience required translators, graphic designers, social media operators and people familiar with Japanese political and cultural contexts. Large language models can now help operators correct grammar, adjust tone, generate images, and produce multiple versions of the same narrative for different audiences within minutes. In other words, AI is making China’s information warfare more scalable, faster and more localized. How, then, should Japan respond? Taiwan offers one useful point of reference. Taiwan has faced Chinese information operations for years and shares a Chinese-language environment with the mainland. Beijing therefore does not face the same linguistic barrier when targeting Taiwanese society that it encounters in Japan. Precisely for that reason, Taiwan was forced to develop social mechanisms for dealing with large-scale disinformation campaigns and networks of suspicious accounts. Taiwan’s experience does not rely solely on government agencies or third-party fact-checkers. Individual users also identify, report, and block suspicious accounts, while civil society organizations and researchers continuously monitor information networks and patterns of coordinated behavior. Language and culture themselves can also serve as tools for identifying manipulation. Although Taiwan and China both use Chinese, there are clear differences in vocabulary, grammar, social experience, and political context. Chinese influence operators can use AI to reduce these differences, but they cannot easily reproduce the cultural background and lived experience accumulated within another society. Japan retains the same kind of advantage. Japanese language and social culture are highly contextual. Even if Chinese operators use AI to improve translation and content generation, that does not mean they can fully understand the linguistic and political differences between generations, regions, and social groups in Japan. Japan should therefore move beyond a defensive model that waits for false information to appear and then fact-checks it. The more important task is to strengthen society’s ability to recognize coordinated influence operations before they gain traction. This is also why information-security cooperation between Japan and Taiwan should become more institutionalized. The two sides could deepen exchanges on identifying coordinated accounts, detecting deepfakes, analyzing foreign influence networks and monitoring information environments during major disasters, elections, or political crises. AI is making Chinese information operations cheaper, faster and easier to deploy across language barriers. But it still cannot fully replicate the cultural knowledge and lived experience embedded in a society. Japan therefore does not need to build a wall capable of blocking every piece of false information. It needs to build an information environment in which foreign influence operations are less likely to succeed. As Japan and Taiwan confront increasingly similar information-security threats, sharing their experience in identifying and countering Chinese influence operations could become an increasingly important part of regional security cooperation.