HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

AI-Powered Chinese Surveillance Campaign 'Peer Review' Used for Real-Time Monitoring of Anti-State Speech on Western Social Media

February 21, 2025

OpenAI recently discovered evidence of a Chinese state-sponsored AI surveillance system, named 'Peer Review'. This AI-powered tool, allegedly built upon Meta's open-source Llama model, is designed to monitor and report real-time instances of anti-state speech on Western social media platforms. The detection came about when a developer reportedly used OpenAI's technology to debug its code. Additionally, disinformation campaigns targeting Chinese dissidents and propaganda dissemination in Latin America were also identified.

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Alleged deployer
chinese-state-linked-actors, chinese-communist-party
Alleged developer
various-open-source-ai-developers, meta, chinese-state-security-researchers, openai
Alleged harmed parties
western-social-media-communities, social-media-users-in-latin-america, social-media-users, opposition-voices-against-the-chinese-communist-party, chinese-dissidents, cai-xia

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/939

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.