Whoa — you need to see this latest breakdown from OpenAI, because it illustrates exactly how geopolitical chess is being played out on our screens right now! The company released a report detailing two distinct clusters of ChatGPT users almost certainly based in China who ran coordinated influence operations aimed at turning Americans against AI data centers. The 'Data Center Bandwagon' group produced English comic strips and social media posts framing big tech energy use as the reason consumer electricity bills are skyrocketing, even going so far as to generate insults targeting Chinese dissidents while masquerading as US-based professionals. These weren't just random bot runs; they were sophisticated operations by what OpenAI believes is a private Chinese company working for government clients — and the team was thorough enough to upload actual strategy documents detailing how to build fake social media identities that wouldn't get flagged, while even embedding links to legitimate news about grid capacity auctions.
What makes this so effective (and dangerous) is that they weren't inventing controversy; they were inserting themselves into real American anxiety about power costs that are already a legitimate issue near data centers. Bloomberg reported in some areas electricity prices have surged up 267% over five years because server demand outstripped supply, which is exactly the pain point these actors exploited to make their operation feel authentic rather than manufactured. The second group went even more targeted, generating content critical of US tariffs and policy across English, Italian, Japanese, and traditional Chinese — specifically tailoring messages for Taiwanese audiences while keeping Xi Jinping out of the generated images as if that made them harder to track. OpenAI's own postmortem admits these campaigns didn't actually shift public opinion significantly — largely because they tapped into debate already raging online — but the point remains: this is covert influence operating in plain sight, and OpenAI still can't say why these actors chose an American chatbot instead of a Chinese alternative like DeepSeek.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2191966/openai-china-influence-campaigns-against-data-centers-report/
What makes this so effective (and dangerous) is that they weren't inventing controversy; they were inserting themselves into real American anxiety about power costs that are already a legitimate issue near data centers. Bloomberg reported in some areas electricity prices have surged up 267% over five years because server demand outstripped supply, which is exactly the pain point these actors exploited to make their operation feel authentic rather than manufactured. The second group went even more targeted, generating content critical of US tariffs and policy across English, Italian, Japanese, and traditional Chinese — specifically tailoring messages for Taiwanese audiences while keeping Xi Jinping out of the generated images as if that made them harder to track. OpenAI's own postmortem admits these campaigns didn't actually shift public opinion significantly — largely because they tapped into debate already raging online — but the point remains: this is covert influence operating in plain sight, and OpenAI still can't say why these actors chose an American chatbot instead of a Chinese alternative like DeepSeek.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2191966/openai-china-influence-campaigns-against-data-centers-report/