Suspected Chinese operatives are using ChatGPT to fuel propaganda efforts targeting American political discourse, according to a Thursday threat report from OpenAI.
The company said Chinese actors leveraged its model to generate posts that played both sides of hot-button U.S. issues, mocked President Donald Trump’s tariff regime and spread politically charged content across TikTok, X, Reddit and Facebook. OpenAI said four of the 10 malicious accounts were likely of Chinese origin.
“What we’re seeing from China is a growing range of covert operations using a growing range of tactics,” said Ben Nimmo, an investigator at OpenAI, according to NPR. “[The operations] targeted many different countries and topics, even including a strategy game. Some of them combined elements of influence operations, social engineering, surveillance. And they did work across multiple platforms and websites.”
2) Also likely China-origin covert IO we called “Sponsored Discontent”. It generated tweets criticizing dissident Cai Xia, but also translated articles from Chinese to Spanish and landed them in news outlets in LATAM and Spain.
One of the articles was listed as “sponsored”. pic.twitter.com/RpRunfCs9E
— Ben Nimmo (@benimmo) February 21, 2025
These operations used ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, translate propaganda into Spanish for Latin American outlets and generate performance reviews bragging about their own influence work. One campaign — internally dubbed “Sneer Review” — mass-produced short political comments in multiple languages across multiple platforms.
Another account used ChatGPT to impersonate both sides of American culture war debates, injecting synthetic outrage into sensitive issues with the apparent intent to amplify discord. One of the more elaborate efforts even created fake sock puppet accounts to give their content the appearance of grassroots traction.
Chinese operators also used the chatbot to attack a niche Taiwanese video game called “Reversed Front,” which is rife with anti-CCP themes. OpenAI found the group generated dozens of negative comments in Chinese about the game, even using ChatGPT to author a faux long-form article claiming it had sparked widespread public outrage.
“The threat actors used our models to generate what appear to have been internal documents,” OpenAI’s report reads. “One was a detailed essay — written in the style of a public security document — on how members of China’s public security organizations should cultivate self-discipline and embody Xi Jinping’s teachings on the rule of law.”
Beijing’s embassy in Washington did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Beyond China, OpenAI disrupted smaller influence operations tied to Russia, Iran, North Korea and a marketing firm in the Philippines. None of the embassies for those countries responded to requests for comment, excluding North Korea, which has no U.S. embassy. But the company emphasized none of the campaigns managed to achieve meaningful engagement with real users before they were shut down.
“Activity on multiple platforms, but little authentic engagement or their content was widely shared,” the report reads.
OpenAI also didn’t respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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