LLMMedium
PRC-Linked Accounts Reportedly Used ChatGPT in Covert Campaigns Targeting U.S. AI Policy Debates
- Occurred
- Jun 10, 2026
- Published
- Jul 9, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
OpenAI reported that two clusters of ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China used its models to support apparent covert influence operations about U.S. AI and technology policy. The accounts reportedly generated a variety of media and social media comments about AI data centers, electricity costs, tariffs, and U.S. tech competition before OpenAI banned them.
Developers
- Synthetic media generation technology developers
- OpenAI
- Large language model developers
- Chatbot developers
- Synthetic image generation technology developers
Deployers
- People's Republic of China-linked influence operators
- OpenAI users
- Information manipulation actors in China
- Information manipulation actors
- ChatGPT users
Harmed parties
- Social media users
- People participating in U.S. AI policy debates
- OpenAI
- National security and intelligence stakeholders
- General public
- Epistemic integrity
- Communities debating AI data center development
- General public of the United States
Tags
- response
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: ChatGPT accounts used for covert influence operations, representing misuse of language model capabilities.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8