Speaking at The Hill’s Nation Summit last week, Florida Republican Kat Cammack claimed that the Chinese government was deploying “digital twins” of every member of Congress. These twins, digital replicas of individual lawmakers, are reportedly built from publicly available data and used to manipulate American politics. Cammack offered no evidence for this allegation, while the broader media largely ignored it.

American academics had already published a proof of concept

American academics had already published a proof of concept

Yet, Cammack’s statement is more interesting than critics might recognize. China may or may not have built 535 virtual legislators. But it easily could. More importantly, somebody almost certainly will. Public figures have spent their entire professional lives publishing the training data for their digital replicas. A member of Congress’s votes, speeches, tweets, articles, press releases, donor relationships and committee interventions form a remarkably complete behavioral record. Taken together, this material allows any technically competent actor to not only imitate how a politician speaks, but to model how they are likely to behave.

This isn’t theoretical. In April of last........

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