ExclusiveChina Targets Dissidents Globally With ChatGPT

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story. A new report from OpenAI says Chinese operatives try to weaponize chat GPT to silence critics at home and abroad, from Chinese dissidents to foreign political leaders. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is resigning from Harvard University as scrutiny intensifies over his past ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He's also stepping down from the OpenAI board in November. The former Air Force pilot is accused of illegally training Chinese military pilots. Prosecutors say he violated federal export laws after a 24-year career flying advanced combat aircraft. The panel joins NTD to discuss. China's military leadership has been shaken by power struggles, with more than 100 senior officers ousted or disappearing in recent years. What does it mean for Beijing's ability to invade Taiwan? And U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Russia and China should be included in any future nuclear arms control agreement. It comes as he addresses the relationship between the world's two largest economies. I think we've reached a point at least of sort of strategic stability in the relationship. A Chinese influence operation tied to Beijing's police appears to have blown its own cover after using chat GPT as part of the campaign. OpenAI says the now banned user was targeting critics of the Chinese Communist Party, both at home and abroad. In a report released Thursday, the company says the actor tried to plan smear campaigns, harass dissidents, and silence foreign political leaders who speak out against Beijing. Investigators say the user attempted to orchestrate a coordinated smear campaign against Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. That's after she criticized the CCP's human rights abuses in Inner Mongolia back in Prompts asked the chatbot to create negative social media posts, fake accounts posing as foreign dissidents, to pressure Japanese lawmakers. The activity didn't stop there. OpenAI says the same actor targeted other Chinese dissidents and Beijing critics. This included efforts to mass report activists like Hu Bo on X and flood the platform with fake profiles using his name and image. Investigators describe the campaign as coordinated and well resourced. It's been designed to apply social and psychological pressure. They say the tactics range from harassment and falsified violations to attempts to disrupt critics' live streams. OpenAI notes the tactics are similar to an earlier China-linked influence campaign known as spamouflage. But this time, generative AI was part of Beijing's playbook. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers on Wednesday said he will resign from teaching at Harvard at the end of the academic year. The resignation comes amid ongoing fallout regarding his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He reportedly sought advice from Epstein on how to pursue one of his students, Jing Keyu. She's a prominent Chinese economist and the daughter of a former Chinese vice finance minister. In addition to these controversies, Summers maintains deep ties with Beijing. While serving as Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, he played a key role in helping China join the World Trade Organization. And during his time as Harvard's president and later as a professor, Summers kept close and frequent ties with China's academic and political circles. Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary, is resigning from Harvard University as fallout continues over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. In a Wednesday statement, Summers said, quote, I have made the difficult decision to retire from my Harvard professorship at the end of this academic year. Summers has been under fire since the U.S. House Oversight Committee released documents that detailed ongoing personal correspondence between Summers and Epstein. However, no evidence of wrongdoing has surfaced so far from those documents or subsequent releases of the so-called Epstein files from the Justice Department. Summers had already discontinued teaching roles at Harvard and went on leave as the director of a business and government school at the university. After the university said in November it would investigate names that were mentioned in the files. A spokesperson said in a statement that Harvard's Kennedy School had accepted Summers' resignation, quote, in connection with the ongoing review by the university of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government. In November, he also had resigned from the board of OpenAI. Summers said then he was deeply ashamed of his actions and said he would step back from public commitments to repair relationships with the people closest to me. A former U.S. Air Force pilot has been arrested for allegedly providing defense services to the Chinese military. Federal officials say 65-year-old Gerald Eddie Brown Jr., also known by the call sign Runner, was taken into custody in Indiana. Prosecutors allege that Brown conspired to train pilots alongside Chinese military personnel without the required State Department license. He once trained American service members on advanced combat aircraft including the F-35. He was charged with violating the Arms Export Control Act. According to the complaint, Brown traveled to China in late 2023 playing the role as instructor fighter pilot and remained there until earlier this month. One of those individuals was a previously convicted Chinese hacker tied to military espionage. The Justice Department and the FBI say the case highlights growing efforts by Beijing to exploit former U.S. military expertise. They vowed to hold anyone who assists America's adversaries accountable. Just how widespread is it for U.S. experts to work with foreign adversaries and how strict should the U.S. be about training or assisting China specifically? NTD's Don Ma spoke with Michael Lucci, founder and CEO of State Armor. It's an organization dedicated to helping states enact solutions to global security threats. Also joining him, Casey Fleming, CEO of Black Ops Partners Corporations and the author of a new book The Red Tsunami. Take a look. How common is this kind of activity where an American citizen uses their knowledge or expertise to aid or in this case train the Chinese regime? Don, they're always trying to compromise American citizens. They're always trying to compromise permanent nationals in the United States. This is one of the most egregious examples where they have a former American general teaching them how to use the most advanced air platforms that we have presumably for a future war with the United States. That's who they'd be using them against. But we had a more recent conviction of a State Department employee who has passed along classified information. We had a recent conviction of a naval enlisted who was also passing along classified information to help China build its war machine. From top to bottom, whether it's the military, our universities, or transnational repression, China seeks to compromise our society throughout, extract the value that they can, and then use that value to harm us in the future. Well, it's not limited just to the military. This is just the case in point for the day. This happens in all sectors of business, government, where everybody's attacked and compromised. This is something that's very serious, of course. This guy, this American, was trained by the American taxpayers using that money and intellectual property to go against his own people. It's first and foremost treason. We need to bring back the very, very strong treason laws that we had in the past of aiding and abetting our enemies. FBI Director Christopher Wray and Kash Patel have said for many years that the CCP and China is the single biggest threat to the future of the United States. So these guys are going against their country. They're going against the taxpayers. But the problem is this is not just a one-off. This is happening just like drops of water in a bucket. So Casey, how do we deter this? Michael says execution hasn't been used for treason for a long time. Maybe laws need to be changed. How do we prevent this? Laws must be changed, not just on this piece of it with treason, but also with foreign influence. All these things, they're absolutely eroding our country very, very quickly. We're running out of time. I think that these treason laws, as well as foreign influence laws, should be maximum penalties. I'm thinking minimum 50 years. And something like this should absolutely constitute death. In my book, they took an oath to protect our country. Now they're giving away all of our secrets that the taxpayers paid for and to violate that oath. He's the tip of the spear. He's F-35 latest technology. He's weapons deployment, nuclear weapons deployment. He was an instructor pilot and a simulator pilot. So he already is a fantastic instructor because he's been trained by the American taxpayers to do that. So you need to set an example. Let me tell you, if he was anywhere else in the world, if he was in China, he would be hung very quickly. He'd be lucky if he got a bullet. So we have to stop messing around as a country. We are in a war today. This is the end stage, which is conventional or kinetic war, which you're already in. We are all in a war today. Every American person is in that war, which is called unrestricted war. Again, conventional war is the last stage of that piece of it. So Michael, what is the gravity of the situation? Is every American in a war right now? Communist China is bringing a war to every American. I don't think that every American realizes that that's happening. We have over a million Americans have been killed by fentanyl. That's an intentional operation by communist China. Those Americans are largely military age men. China knows that that's what they're doing. They're killing military age men through chemical warfare on the United States. If we could do one simple idea, abide by one simple principle, it's just stop helping communist China. They have told us what they want to do. They've told us that they want to knock us off as the leading nation of the world. They want to destroy our alliance structure. And yet we have generals going over there and training them. And it's not just that. There are billions of dollars coming out of the Pentagon for military research into American universities on hypersonics, on AI for combat operations. And those American universities are partnering with China's military to develop that research. So we're just handing over our military research, whether it's something this extremely direct, like someone being treasonous and traitorous, or it's the universities just leaking our research, or our businesses doing the same thing. All of it has to stop. We need to stop helping communist China. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the U.S. and China have reached strategic stability in their relationship, warning that a trade war would hurt both nations. I think we've reached a point, at least, of sort of strategic stability in the relationship. There remain issues of disagreement. There remain issues that we know in the long term are going to have to be confronted and could be irritants in our relationship. We've not been bashful in saying that we don't think it's sustainable to live in a world where we depend on some country for 90 percent of anything, whether it's supply chains or critical minerals or the like, pharmaceuticals and the like. And we have every intention of doing everything we can to ensure that our critical supply chains are diversified. And that will continue to be a point of contention, I imagine. But that's something that's critical to our national security and that we've been working on and will continue to work on. Rubio says the administration will continue to push for a trilateral arms deal with Russia and China. Well, we think ultimately in the 21st century for there to be a true arms control agreement, it has to involve China. Their stockpiles have increased dramatically. Their position that they would argue that they're still way behind the United States and Russia, we think that's irrelevant. They certainly have the capacity to catch up and are well on their way to doing so. President Trump will travel to China from March 31st to April 2nd for a highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The talks are expected to revolve around extending a trade truce that kept both countries from hiking tariffs further. And on the issue of Taiwan, Beijing insists it's a so-called domestic issue. But President Trump recently said, quote, Taiwan is Taiwan. A sweeping purge of China's top military leadership is raising questions about Beijing's ability to invade Taiwan. Over a hundred senior Chinese military officers have been dismissed or gone missing these past four years as Xi Jinping tightened his grip on power. The ousting affected over half of the top leadership positions in the Chinese military, including the highest ranking posts. That's according to a new report Tuesday from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The power struggle is showing no signs of easing. And on Thursday, China removed nine senior military officials from its national legislature. Five of them have already gone missing. The purge hollowed out the top of China's Of the six generals appointed to Beijing's top military decision-making body, only one remains alongside Xi Jinping. This left many wondering whether Beijing is capable of invading Taiwan in the next few years. An operation like this would be highly complex for Beijing, especially if the U.S. and Japan were to aid Taiwan. Finding qualified people to fill the positions could be a challenge since the remaining officers have less combat experience. But the report noted that the Chinese military still can carry out less complex operations against Taiwan, such as a blockade. It added that newly promoted leaders might hesitate to report bad news, fearing they could meet the same fate as their predecessors. As a result, Xi could be unrealistically confident in his military's capabilities. Hong Kong democracy advocate and media tycoon Jimmy Lai has won an appeal overturning his fraud conviction on Thursday. A Hong Kong appeals court has ruled that prosecutors failed to prove Lai had committed rent fraud. Hong Kong's Beijing-aligned government said they would study the judgment thoroughly and consider whether or not to appeal. The conviction overturned Thursday stemmed from a fraud case in which prosecutors accused Lai and a business partner of breaching a commercial rental contract. They allege that Lai's now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper allowed a consulting firm he ran to use space in the building. The lease specified that the space could only be used for publishing and printing. In its decision, the appeals court wrote that prosecutors had not proven the two men's guilt. Lai had previously been sentenced to nearly six years in jail on this case. Despite this ruling, the 78-year-old former publisher remains behind bars on separate national security charges. Lai is currently serving a 20-year sentence under China's national security law, which he denies. Google Threat Intelligence Group says they disrupted a Chinese-linked hacking group that breached at least 53 organizations across 42 countries. The report says the hacker group, tracked as UNC2814, also known as Gallium, has a long history of targeting international governments and global telecommunications organizations. Google says the hacking campaign is separate from Salt Typhoon, a major Chinese regime-backed cyber espionage campaign. The company says its efforts have terminated the group's access to a backdoor, disabled its infrastructure, and revoked its accounts and access to relevant Google products. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz finished his two-day visit in China on Thursday. Following his talks with Xi Jinping and other top Chinese leaders, Beijing agreed to purchase up to 120 Airbus aircraft. Beijing also signed more than 10 additional deals with German companies across key sectors. The trip aims to ease trade tensions of the two countries and narrow Germany's trade gap with the world's second-largest economy. Here's more. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz won a pledge by China to import more high-quality goods from Germany on Wednesday. He visited Beijing, aiming to reset relations clouded by a yawning trade deficit with the world's second-largest economy. Merz faces a balancing act of redefining the economic relationship that is increasingly unfavorable to German interests. Berlin sees an undervalued yuan, market-distorting subsidies, and overcapacity among Chinese exporters. And German businesses are complaining that Chinese competitors in their markets are undercutting them with cheaper products. That has built massive trade surpluses with Europe's largest economy, amounting to $106 billion last year. Premier Li Chang said China wished to cooperate in areas like automobiles and chemicals, as well as emerging fields, including artificial intelligence and biomedicine. Coming up, the U.S. and Iran holding round three of talks in Geneva to try and reach a breakthrough toward a nuclear deal, which heavily impacts Beijing's strategy in the Middle East. North Korea leader Kim Jong-un says he plans to expand the country's nuclear arsenal and develop stronger missiles. More on that after the break here on China In Focus. Welcome back to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Special Envoy Steve Whitkoff and his team are in Geneva for a third round of talks with Iran aimed at reaching a nuclear deal. This comes as President Trump threatened Iran with military action in his recent State of the Union address. And talks are wrapping up as we speak between the U.S. and Iran in Geneva today without a clear resolution. And that's coming as President Trump has repeatedly said that he always prefers diplomacy first, while also saying in his State of the Union address that it's unacceptable that Iran has developed ballistic missiles that can reach both Europe and U.S. bases overseas, and that they're now in the midst of developing ones that could also reach the U.S. President Trump in his address is also touting Operation Midnight Hammer. That's the taking out of Iran's nuclear program last June, and during his first term, striking General Soleimani. Take a look at this. We wiped it out and they want to start all over again, and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions. We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret words. We will never have a nuclear weapon. My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy, but one thing is certain. I will never allow the world's number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon. President Trump's State of the Union address coming amid the largest military deployment in the Gulf since the 2003 buildup to the Iraq war, with the world's largest warship, the USS Ford, leaving southern Greece for the Middle East as third round of talks begin in Geneva. Moments before the President's address, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivering a classified briefing on Iran to the Gang of Eight. Iran poses a very great threat to the United States and has for a very long time. After their nuclear program was obliterated, they were told not to try to restart it, and here they are. You can see them always trying to rebuild elements of it. They're not enriching right now, but they're trying to get to the point where they ultimately can. Rubio says it's clear the regime has not abandoned their desire to enrich again, and that they're trying to achieve intercontinental ballistic missiles, something the regime has refused to talk about. We saw North Korea do it. We've seen other countries do it in the past, and we would view that as a grave threat to the United States. But already now they possess missiles that threaten American interests. As we speak, they possess thousands of short-range ballistic missiles that can reach US bases located in the region, in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, in Bahrain, in the United Arab Emirates, throughout the region. According to Iran International, since last month, over 36,000 people have been killed in the Iranian regime's crackdown on anti-government protesters. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham saying that if America helps the Iranian people, we'll have a 21st century Berlin Wall moment. He predicts the Ayatollah's fall will trigger a sequence of events similar to Reagan's USSR takedown. Quote, this regime is made up of religious Nazis that are the largest state sponsor of terrorism. The regime has American blood on its hands, and they have killed over 30,000 of their citizens simply because they demand the end to their oppression. I would like to see the people of Iran change the regime. It's long overdue. Vice President J.D. Vance, when asked if the Ayatollah has to go, says, I think the president ultimately will make the decision about how to ensure Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. I think the supreme leader and everybody in their system should understand that we've been crystal clear, and we're hopeful that we're able to come to a good resolution without the military. But if we have to use the military, the president, of course, has that right as well. Reuters is now reporting that Iran is close to a deal with the Chinese regime to purchase anti-ship cruise missiles. And according to weapons experts, those missiles, if in the hands of the Iranian regime, would pose a significant threat to U.S. naval forces in the region. North Korea leader Kim Jong-un said Thursday he would expand the country's nuclear arsenal and develop stronger intercontinental ballistic missiles that could He also announced plans to develop short-range missiles capable of striking South Korea. Kim made the remarks after a military parade in Pyongyang on Wednesday. The parade featured tanks and armored units, mechanized infantry and fire assault divisions, including groups reportedly linked to deployments in the Ukraine war. The U.S. military has seized an oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking it from Caribbean waters. This is the third sanctioned vessel seized in the region. The Pentagon posted on X Tuesday saying the mission took place overnight. It says the vessel was trying to evade sanctions. The ship is linked to Shanghai Legendary Ship Management Company Limited and is under U.S. sanctions. Venezuelan shipping reports show that the ship sailed off in January from Venezuelan waters. It was carrying around 1.9 million barrels of heavy crude oil bound for China. The Pentagon warns, quote, By land, air or sea, our forces will find you and deliver justice. That's all for today's China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. If you have any feedback on the show or have something you'd like to see us cover, send us an email at chinainfocusintd.com. We'd love to hear from you. For on the clock original news coverage, visit us at ntd.com or download our app. Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.