Safeguard Defenders

Force in Play

Named as both a documenter and a target of Chinese transnational repression

A Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT the way most people use a private notebook: to draft, revise, and polish status reports about their work. The problem: the work was a covert campaign to silence critics of the Chinese Communist Party living overseas. OpenAI's threat intelligence team read the reports, pieced together a transnational repression operation involving hundreds of operators, thousands of fake social media accounts, forged American court documents, and impersonation of United States immigration officials; it then published the findings.

Updated May 29