ChatGPT maker OpenAI has been forced to ban accounts linked to the Chinese government over surveillance fears.
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In its latest public threat report, OpenAI said suspected Chinese government operatives had asked ChatGPT to help write a proposal for a tool to conduct large-scale surveillance and to help promote another that allegedly scans social media accounts for “extremist speech.”
Authoritarian AI
OpenAI warned in the report how AI could be harnessed to make government repression more efficient and also provided a “rare snapshot into the broader world of authoritarian abuses of AI.”
“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,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, told broadcaster CNN. “It’s not last year that the Chinese Communist Party started surveilling its own population. But now they’ve heard of AI and they’re thinking, oh maybe we can use this to get a little bit better.”
In one case, a ChatGPT user “likely connected to a [Chinese] government entity” asked the AI model to help write a proposal for a tool that analyzes the travel movements and police records of the Uyghur minority and other “high-risk” people, according to the OpenAI report.
Another Chinese-speaking user asked ChatGPT for help designing “promotional materials” for a tool that purportedly scans X, Facebook, owned by Meta Platforms (META) and other social media platforms for political and religious content, the report said. OpenAI said it banned both users.
Chinese Response
Asked about OpenAI’s findings, Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, said: “We oppose groundless attacks and slanders against China.”
He said that China was rapidly building an AI governance system with distinct national characteristics.
“This approach emphasizes a balance between development and security, featuring innovation, security and inclusiveness. The government has introduced major policy plans and ethical guidelines, as well as laws and regulations on algorithmic services, generative AI, and data security,” Liu said.
China and the U.S. are locked in a race for AI supremacy. The Chinese government is backing its cluster of AI companies such as DeepSeek, which rattled major U.S. tech stocks earlier this year, and start-ups.
OpenAI is helping to boost U.S. AI power including the supply deal earlier this week with chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
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