Chinese AI Models Deployed for US Surveillance and Disinformation Campaigns

On 04 March 2025, Voice of Amer­i­ca report­ed that Chi­na is uti­liz­ing its DeepSeek AI plat­form and oth­er arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence mod­els to con­duct sur­veil­lance and infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions tar­get­ing the Unit­ed States. The arti­cle begins:

The Unit­ed States may become the sec­ond coun­try after Aus­tralia to ban Chi­na’s DeepSeek arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence on gov­ern­ment devices. U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Josh Got­theimer and Darin LaHood intro­duced a bipar­ti­san bill propos­ing the ban. In their let­ter to 47 U.S. gov­er­nors and the may­or of Wash­ing­ton, the con­gress­men warned that DeepSeek could pose secu­ri­ty risks to sen­si­tive gov­ern­ment data and cyber­se­cu­ri­ty and Amer­i­cans’ pri­va­cy, NBC News report­ed on March 3. Chi­na denies the alle­ga­tions. How­ev­er, con­cerns high­light­ed by the U.S. law­mak­ers and state offi­cials are not with­out mer­it, experts say. The Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has report­ed­ly also used AI mod­els for mass sur­veil­lance, includ­ing the col­lec­tion of bio­met­ric data and social media lis­ten­ing oper­a­tions that report to Chi­na’s secu­ri­ty ser­vices and the mil­i­tary, as well as for infor­ma­tion attacks on U.S. and Chi­nese dis­si­dents abroad…

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Key Points:

• US law­mak­ers have intro­duced bipar­ti­san leg­is­la­tion to ban Chi­na’s DeepSeek AI from gov­ern­ment devices, fol­low­ing secu­ri­ty con­cerns about data collection.
• Chi­nese sur­veil­lance com­pa­nies TopSec, QAX and NetEase have inte­grat­ed DeepSeek to enhance mon­i­tor­ing capa­bil­i­ties for gov­ern­ment secu­ri­ty services.
• Researchers dis­cov­ered hid­den code in DeepSeek that shares user infor­ma­tion with Chi­na Mobile, a com­pa­ny banned in the US since 2019.
• Ope­nAI iden­ti­fied Chi­na-based actors using AI to gen­er­ate anti-US con­tent in Span­ish-lan­guage media across Latin Amer­i­ca, por­tray­ing Amer­i­ca as moral­ly declining.