Editor's note: Xiang Haoyu is a specially appointed research fellow at the Department for Asia-Pacific Studies, China Institute of International Studies. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

In recent years, with the rapid development of AI technology, generative AI has become an important tool for governments worldwide to promote administrative digitization. Reportedly, Japan's Digital Agency is deploying a government-dedicated generative AI system named "Gennai" on a large scale, which is expected to cover approximately 180,000 central government civil servants.

On the surface, this appears to be a technological innovation aimed at improving administrative efficiency. However, a closer analysis of its underlying model dependencies, core data sources, and application scenarios reveals an alarming trend.

If a government AI system relies on selectively curated historical data and foreign-developed foundation models, it may not simply automate existing administrative practices; it may also reproduce and amplify the political assumptions embedded in those systems. Without adequate safeguards, "Gennai" could become vulnerable to political manipulation and, in the process, contribute to historical revisionism and what might be called "digital militarism."

The 'truncated' historical database

The objectivity of AI-generated content depends heavily on the data used to train, retrieve and ground the system. The Japanese government has fed approximately 18 million pages of government data into the "Gennai" system, with one of the core corpora being data from Japan's Official Gazette (Kanpō) spanning from May 1947 to the present. 

The choice of this specific starting point carries heavy political significance in terms of historical narrative. May 1947 marks the implementation of Japan's post-war Peace Constitution. By anchoring the data's starting point precisely at this moment, the historical database of the "Gennai" system is physically and logically "truncated." This implies that key historical archives – such as the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War regarding Japan's 1945 surrender and vast records of aggression committed by Japanese militarism against Asian nations during World War II – are very likely systematically excluded from the AI's core knowledge graph. This data gap directly causes "Gennai" to lack the fundamental framework of post-war defeat characterization and historical reflection when addressing modern history, state responsibility and territorial disputes. 

Reports indicate that the system is already being used to assist in drafting Cabinet decisions, white papers, and Parliamentary response scripts, with a Japanese Cabinet minister publicly admitting that his response draft for Parliament was generated by "Gennai."

As right-wing political forces in Japan have surged in recent years, they have frequently asserted illegal territorial claims, and attempted to downplay or even glorify wars of aggression. When statements from these right-wing figures are entered as prompts into "Gennai" and form a feedback loop within the system, the AI continuously learns, reinforces, and outputs content aligned with right-wing logic. Because these outputs are ultimately published as government leadership responses and official white papers, they adopt a dual disguise of "official authority" and "technological neutrality." Through the automated operation of generative AI, distorted historical views and radical geopolitical stances complete their whitewashing and transformation from extreme political rhetoric into "objective national narrative." 

Algorithmic geopolitics

Another core characteristic of the "Gennai" system is its deep dependency on US foundation models. Rather than being developed independently by Japan from scratch, the system uses a multi-model architecture that integrates leading American large language models, including those developed by companies like Amazon AWS and Anthropic. The choice of this technical architecture is not only a consideration of technical capacity, but also reflects the deep binding and geopolitical calculations between the US-Japan alliance in AI and information security. 

The involvement of US tech giants in providing the underlying AI infrastructure for the Japanese government effectively creates a highly coordinated "intelligence alliance" in cyberspace. American foundation models inherently reflect pre-training biases shaped by Western values and assumptions. When these models are combined with the selective, carefully filtered datasets produced by the Japanese government, the interaction between the two can readily generate a compounded form of informational bias.

This convergence of US-Japan algorithmic geopolitics brings negative spillover effects. On one hand, strategically, the US often adopts a tacit agreement or even indulgence toward the historical revisionism of Japanese right-wing forces in exchange for Japan's full cooperation with US global geostrategy. On the other hand, within the current landscape of Japanese public opinion regarding China, the potential for "Gennai" to generate massive negative China-related information and policy texts promoting the "China threat" narrative highly aligns with the Cold War mentality of both nations. When handling sensitive issues such as East Asian security and maritime affairs, this AI system inevitably becomes an information engine that amplifies regional confrontation and manipulates public perception.

Through technological alliances, the US and Japan are implicitly establishing discourse power rooted in algorithmic hegemony, attempting to dominate the interpretation of East Asian geopolitics and historical issues in the international arena. 

Risk of 'digital militarism'

If revising history textbooks poisons the mindset of a single generation, feeding government AI with biased official data pollutes the entire digital future. Disclosures by Japanese media and academics regarding "Gennai" reveal a deeper strategic risk: the stealthy rise of "digital militarism."

Currently, Japan is undergoing an unprecedented post-war transformation in defense policy, significantly increasing defense spending and seeking counterstrike capabilities, essentially hollowing out its Peace Constitution and accelerating remilitarization. When this political drive for military expansion meets AI technology, AI ceases to be merely an administrative productivity tool and evolves into a "soft weapon" for cognitive warfare, public opinion warfare, and strategic deception.

Once official documents generated by "Gennai" – laden with right-wing undertones, nationalist sentiments, and xenophobic tendencies – are archived as public records of the Japanese government, they will accumulate extensively across the internet. 

When general foundation models worldwide scrape data, they typically absorb these generated texts labeled as Japan's "official white papers" or "Parliamentary records" as "highly trustworthy authoritative sources." Over time, distorted historical views dominated by Japanese right-wing ideology, whitewashed narratives of aggressive wars, and hostile discourse targeting neighboring countries will spread globally through the worldwide AI data ecosystem. This large-scale, automated information pollution will subtly reshape the international community's understanding of established WWII historical verdicts and shake the ideological foundations of the post-war international order.