Incident 939: AI-Powered Chinese Surveillance Campaign 'Peer Review' Used for Real-Time Monitoring of Anti-State Speech on Western Social Media

Description: OpenAI reportedly uncovered evidence of a Chinese state-linked AI-powered surveillance campaign, dubbed "Peer Review," designed to monitor and report anti-state speech on Western social media in real time. The system, believed to be built on Meta’s open-source Llama model, was detected when a developer allegedly used OpenAI’s technology to debug its code. OpenAI also reportedly identified disinformation efforts targeting Chinese dissidents and spreading propaganda in Latin America.

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Alleged: Various open-source AI developers , Meta and Chinese state security researchers developed an AI system deployed by Chinese state-linked actors and Chinese Communist Party, which harmed Western social media communities , Opposition voices against the Chinese Communist Party , Chinese dissidents , Social media users in Latin America and social media users.

Alleged implicated AI systems: Peer Review , OpenAI models and LLaMA

Incident Stats

Incident ID

939

Report Count

Incident Date

2025-02-21

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

OpenAI Uncovers Evidence of A.I.-Powered Chinese Surveillance Tool

nytimes.com

nytimes.com · 2025

OpenAI said on Friday that it had uncovered evidence that a Chinese security operation had built an artificial intelligence-powered surveillance tool to gather real-time reports about anti-Chinese posts on social media services in Western c…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.