OpenAI’s threat intelligence team tracked what it believes are two distinct clusters of activity online from groups with ties to China and posting content seemingly designed to stoke anger around divisive topics like AI and data centers.
The first, dubbed “Data Center Bandwagon,” used ChatGPT to create imagery and social media comments claiming data center buildouts were raising electricity prices for Americans.
Another used the tool to develop images and online posts characterizing tariffs as a covert means for the countries to exert control over the global technological landscape. According to OpenAI, the originating prompts directed ChatGPT to only include U.S. President Donald Trump in this content, while leaving out Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has also made use of tariffs.
In both cases, OpenAI said the operators “likely originated” in China. The anti-data center content was traced to an unnamed Chinese technology company that holds multiple contracts with regional Chinese governments, and both clusters used VPNs to evade restrictions, prompted ChatGPT in simplified Chinese and asked for both English and Chinese-language outputs, all while posing as Americans on social media platforms like X and YouTube.
“This looks like a classic example of a foreign influence operation jumping onto the bandwagon of a genuine and pre-existing domestic debate and trying to manipulate it by using fake accounts posing as Americans,” online, said Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI and author of the report.
While OpenAI – which has sought to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to build datacenters in the U.S. – is not a neutral party, the report does not claim that anti-data center sentiment in the country is being driven or bolstered by foreign propaganda online.
There’s little evidence that the campaigns got much attention outside their own amplification networks. Such engagement from third parties is an imperfect but important indicator of an influence operation’s impact. OpenAI rated the campaigns a 1 and 2 on the Bookings breakout scale, scores that indicate activity on one or more platforms but no evidence of meaningful engagement by targeted audiences.
Additionally, researchers who study state-sponsored influence campaigns say these groups are happy to latch onto and amplify genuine domestic movements or messaging so long as it serves their larger destabilization goals.
Others have suggested that piggybacking off established narratives with organic momentum – like public anger at AI and data centers – can make an influence operation appear more effective.
While AI tools can be leveraged to create such internet content at scale, they often fail to gain traction. Some images used by Chinese actors appear clunky or use overly direct messaging that display a lack of familiarity with both the English language and internet virality.
“I do want to be really clear here: this was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate,” said Nimmo. “The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn’t see any signs that it succeeded.”
He added that while such views are “reasonable” and “sincerely held” by many participants on both sides, “what we don’t want to see is a covert foreign influence operation posing as Americans to try to shape it, still less a foreign influence operation using the very AI that it attacks.”
According to the OpenAI report, the actors used ChatGPT to edit work reports which contained operational security details about their social media campaigns. In them, they described their goals as “establishing persistent and credible accounts, producing visually appealing content to expand audience reach in different regions and maintaining long term account viability by anticipating platform enforcement.”
Another report fed into ChatGPT discussed how best to leverage Facebook’s content ecosystem, groups, pages, hashtags, advertising tools, recommendation systems and reporting mechanisms, as well as strategies for evading Meta’s detection of coordinated inauthentic accounts.
The campaign around tariffs also used ChatGPT to create short comments, comics in English but also Italian, Japanese and traditional Chinese accusing the US of putting profits over loyalty to its allies. OpenAI said they were targeted by the same network on X with an influence campaign alleging a widespread user data breach that Nimmo said “never happened.”
While OpenAI said the campaigns likely originated in China, they do not directly attribute the operations to the Chinese government or actors working on their behalf, but do note that many parts of the campaign and its tactics overlap with pre-established Chinese government propaganda campaigns online.
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OpenAI on Wednesday hailed its plans to safeguard information and aid cybersecurity defenders in the 2026 midterm elections, including work to combat deepfakes and other forms of artificial intelligence misuse.
The announcement builds on commitments from major tech companies in 2024, including OpenAI, to protect elections from AI-infused election interference — efforts that some thought weren’t enough. Government agencies, non-governmental institutes and others have increasingly warned about AI’s ability to have a negative impact on elections even as they advertise its potential for good.
OpenAI’s plan has five planks: spreading reliable information about voting and election results, helping with cybersecurity, watermarking deepfakes, enforcing policies that ban users from deploying its tools for election interference, and weeding out political bias in its models.
OpenAI highlighted that it has made its Codex Security agentic framework and Trusted Access for Cyber framework available to election officials, and was briefing the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors on its tools.
“This is an important moment for cyber defenders across industries, and we believe AI plays a critical role in hardening digital infrastructure — including systems that support elections,” the company said. “OpenAI is committed to building resilience across the infrastructure stack, including in ways that support election execution.”
Some elements of OpenAI’s plans aren’t new so much as it’s taking pieces from other announcements and putting them together in one, such as reiterating last week’s partnership with SynthID to add watermarks to images generated with ChatGPT to assist in evaluating whether something is real or a deepfake.
One new element of Wednesday’s announcement is that OpenAI has struck a partnership with the Associated Press on sharing election data.
One election security expert welcomed the OpenAI announcement.
“Given the prevalence and amplification of disinformation about our elections, sometimes coming from leaders in high office, it’s always a good thing when platforms and services embrace their obligation to deliver accurate information to users,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told CyberScoop. “It appears OpenAI is doing that with this announcement. I hope other platforms embrace this responsibility as well.”
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Advanced Account Security provides stronger login methods, more secure account recovery, shorter sessions, and training exclusion.
The post OpenAI Rolls Out Advanced Security for ChatGPT Accounts appeared first on SecurityWeek.
OpenAI said it is expanding its Trusted Access for Cyber program to “thousands of individuals and organizations,” who will use the company’s technology to root out bugs and vulnerabilities in their products.
The program will also incorporate GPT 5.4 Cyber, a new variant of ChatGPT that OpenAI says is specifically optimized for cybersecurity tasks. OpenAI’s goal with this release is to make advanced cybersecurity tools more widely accessible.
The company said access to the program and cybersecurity-focused model will still be governed by “strong” Know-Your-Customer and identity verification rules to help prevent the model’s spread to bad actors.
“Our goal is to make these tools as widely available as possible while preventing misuse,” the company said in a blog posted Tuesday. “We design mechanisms which avoid arbitrarily deciding who gets access for legitimate use and who doesn’t.”
OpenAI’s announcement comes one week after Anthropic rolled out Project Glasswing, a similar effort that seeks to provide major tech companies with Claude Mythos, an unreleased model that Anthropic officials have claimed is too dangerous to sell commercially.
OpenAI officials noted they publicly announced Trusted Access for Cyber program months earlier. They have also quietly avoided direct comparisons to Mythos, and GPT 5.4 Cyber.
Cybersecurity experts in the U.S. and UK have described Mythos as a significant improvement from previous frontier models around identifying (and potentially exploiting) cybersecurity vulnerabilities, though there remains debate and speculation about the model’s ultimate impact on information security.
Similarly, GPT 5.4 Cyber has been finetuned for testing and vulnerability research, though OpenAI wants to make iterative improvements to the program as lessons are learned.
The company has plans to allow a broader group of cyber operators to use the model to protect critical infrastructure, public services and other digital systems. The company said it is also leery of having too much influence over which industries or sectors ultimately take part in the program.
“We don’t think it’s practical or appropriate to centrally decide who gets to defend themselves,” the blog stated. “Instead, we aim to enable as many legitimate defenders as possible, with access grounded in verification, trust signals, and accountability.”
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