Over the past month, several reports offered new details on the scale and tactics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s foreign influence operations. In late February, OpenAI published findings on how ChatGPT was being misused, including by an account linked to Chinese law enforcement, to plan and document what that user termed “cyber special operations.” Meta’s first report of 2026 on adversarial threats detailed the takedown of a China-linked network targeting Taiwan. The European Council on Foreign Relations published an analysis of China’s influence playbook in Europe, drawing on a decade of documented activity in Poland and the Czech Republic. And the International Campaign for Tibet exposed a Chinese state-backed AI model designed to shape how Tibetan speakers view the region.
The OpenAI report, in particular, offers a rare window into the internal workings of what it termed a “well-resourced, meticulously-orchestrated strategy for covert influence operations against domestic and foreign adversaries.” The resource-intensive effort involves at least hundreds of staff and thousands of fake accounts operating across dozens of platforms worldwide. One status report that the user, who appeared to be linked to Chinese law enforcement, tried to draft with ChatGPT’s help referenced 300 operators in a single Chinese province, with equivalent teams described in other provinces. The operations also used locally-deployed AI tools, including Chinese models like DeepSeek and Qwen, for tasks ranging from content generation to monitoring and profiling targets.
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