‘Chinese’ Operatives Asked ChatGPT To Build Surveillance Tools For Them, OpenAI Says

Last Updated:October 07, 2025, 16:39 IST

OpenAI reports suspected Chinese government operatives used ChatGPT for mass-surveillance proposals and social media monitoring tools.

OpenAI said it banned the accounts after detecting the activity.

Suspected Chinese government operatives used ChatGPT to draft proposals for mass-surveillance tools and to create marketing materials for software that scans social media for political or “extremist” speech, OpenAI said in a new report.

In its threat-intelligence study, “Disrupting Malicious Uses of Our Models,” OpenAI detailed several cases in which accounts it linked to state-affiliated actors tried to use the company’s AI systems for tasks such as writing sales pitches, debugging code and analysing data meant to track people’s movements, police records and online activity.

In one example, a ChatGPT user “likely connected to a [Chinese] government entity” asked the model to help draft a proposal for a program that would analyse the travel and policing records of Uyghurs and other so-called ‘high-risk’ individuals. Another Chinese-language user requested help designing promotional content for a tool that claimed to monitor X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and other social-media platforms to flag political and religious posts for security services.

OpenAI said it banned the accounts after detecting the activity and shared the findings publicly to warn how generative AI could be weaponised for surveillance and repression. The company called the report a “rare snapshot” of how authoritarian and other malicious actors are already weaving AI into everyday operations- not to invent new cyberweapons, but to make existing tactics like data analysis and propaganda more efficient.

“Adversaries are using AI to improve in areas where they previously struggled- like avoiding basic language errors in influence posts- rather than inventing a new kind of cyberweapon,” said Michael Flossman, an OpenAI security investigator.

Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI’s intelligence team, added, “There’s a push within the People’s Republic of China to get better at using artificial intelligence for large-scale things like surveillance and monitoring.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington dismissed the allegations as “groundless,” saying Beijing is building an AI governance system that “balances development and security” and features “innovation, inclusiveness, and strict data-security rules.”

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