I'm wondering if my current game (me and 7 Human NPRs in Sol) is not buggy. Looking at them 10 years after start with the designer password, the only extra solar colony is from Russia, despite all adjacents systems being JG in both ways by me. What they do, is to mass produce ships with their shipyards, but they all sit in Sol. The NPRs also do survey correctly, but there is no military ship outside of sol, not extrasolar colonization, and the colonies I gave in Sol have the same starting factories and mines compared to 10 years ago.
So I would not say they are passive, as they are surveying and building ships, but for the most part they don't expand or don't build up their current colonies. Even the factories in the smaller colonies are not working and the mineral stockpile correspond exactly to what is produced in 10 years, without any intake or outtake. I don't understand what is going on.