OpenAI says it has banned two clusters of ChatGPT accounts it believes are operating from China, which used its models for covert influence campaigns targeting U.S. tech and policy debates, including one called “Data Center Bandwagon,” that produced social media comments and comic strips blaming AI data centers for rising household electricity bills. Whoever was operating the accounts prompted ChatGPT in Simplified Chinese via VPNs, and posed on X as Americans from a range of backgrounds. Yet OpenAI’s full threat report found that the activity generated virtually no authentic engagement.
A second cluster, “Tech and Tariffs,” generated anti-tariff cartoons under instructions to depict President Trump but never Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and was linked to a network of fake X accounts spreading false claims that ChatGPT user data had been stolen.
OpenAI assessed that the Data Center Bandwagon operators were likely a social media team at a private Chinese tech company working for provincial-level government clients. Among other requests, they asked ChatGPT for comic strips about a grid operator’s capacity auction prices, drawing on a regional newspaper’s reporting, then posted the output on X under hashtags such as #capacityauction, alongside links to legitimate news coverage.
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While no grid operator was named, capacity auction pricing links back to a real, well-documented dispute: PJM Interconnection’s independent market monitor has blamed data centers for an “irreversible” 75.5% increase in power costs across the largest U.S. grid region, with wholesale prices near some data center clusters having climbed as much as 267% in five years. Three U.S. senators have demanded answers from Amazon, Google, and Meta over costs passed to residential customers.
“This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, said. OpenAI rated the activity Category One on the Breakout Scale, meaning it stayed on one platform, with no evidence that it reached genuine audiences.
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The Tech and Tariffs cluster poked fun at U.S.-China competition around tariffs, rare earths, AI, 5G, and industrial resilience, and generated bulk comment batches in English, Italian, Japanese, and Traditional Chinese, the latter aimed at audiences in Taiwan. One operator described the accounts as a “water army,” a Chinese term for coordinated troll networks, and asked ChatGPT to design a system for scraping and analyzing social media posts from individuals flagged as risks. OpenAI said its model returned generic data storage advice and declined to help with collection. Fake accounts in the same X network repeatedly posted fabricated claims that ChatGPT user data had been compromised, which OpenAI reckons is an attempt to damage its own reputation.
In its full threat report, OpenAI compared the campaigns to the 2022 Spamouflage operation, which researchers at ASPI and Mandiant found targeting Lynas Rare Earths, Appia, and USA Rare Earth after Beijing’s 14th Five-Year Plan prioritized rare earths. The new activity followed the adoption of the 15th Five-Year Plan recommendations, elevating AI as a strategic industry for China.
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