OpenAI admitted to spying on its own users during an investigation into whether some users were actually Chinese Communist Party sock puppets using the app to create anti-AI and anti-data center content to be reposted on U.S. social media platforms.
The AI giant published a report Wednesday outlining their suspicions that “clusters” of CCP-linked ChatGPT users were a part of an influence campaign to spread anti-AI propaganda. Earlier in June, House Republicans had called on the Trump administration to investigate alleged Chinese influence on the growing, bipartisan backlash to data centers across the U.S.
Of course, to draw these conclusions, OpenAI needed to surveil users flagged as suspicious and gain access to the prompts they were feeding ChatGPT. Here are the two key paragraphs from the company’s report:
The first cluster generated social media comments and images claiming that data center buildouts for AI were increasing electricity prices for average families. We named this cluster the “Data Center Bandwagon” campaign.
The second cluster generated comments and images criticizing US tariffs as attempts to dominate technological competition and specified in their prompts that the content should not include China’s leader Xi Jinping in the output and instead include only President Trump. This cluster was connected to a network of likely inauthentic social media accounts that were also likely targeting OpenAI by claiming ChatGPT user data had been compromised. These allegations were entirely false. We named this second cluster the “Tech and Tariffs” campaign.
