OpenAI bans ChatGPT accounts linked to Chinese government entities for requesting social media surveillance tools

OpenAI announced Tuesday that it has closed several ChatGPT accounts believed to be connected to Chinese government organizations. The accounts were shut down after users tried to get help creating tools to track and monitor social media activity.

The company released its newest public threat report explaining that some people had asked the chatbot to design social media “listening” tools and other monitoring systems. These requests broke OpenAI’s national security rules. The San Francisco company’s findings point to worries about how generative AI might be misused as the United States and China race to control how the technology grows and what regulations govern it.

OpenAI also closed several accounts that used Chinese language and had employed ChatGPT to help with phishing attacks and malware operations. These accounts had asked the AI model to look into more ways to automate tasks using China’s DeepSeek system.

Multiple malicious networks disrupted

The company said it also shut down accounts linked to suspected Russian-speaking criminal organizations that used the chatbot to help build certain types of malware as per Reuters. Since OpenAI started publishing public threat reports in February of last year, the Microsoft-backed company has stopped and reported more than 40 networks. Its AI models have turned down clearly harmful requests, the company said.

“We found no evidence of new tactics or that our models provided threat actors with novel offensive capabilities,” the company stated in the report.

OpenAI now serves more than 800 million people who use ChatGPT each week. Last week, the company became the most valuable startup in the world after finishing a secondary share sale that valued it at $500 billion. That’s up from its earlier $300 billion value, showing how fast OpenAI has grown its user numbers and income.

The deal let OpenAI employees sell their shares to a group of investors. This group included Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price, according to a source who could not speak publicly about the matter.

The company allowed more than $10 billion worth of stock to be sold on the secondary market, the source said. The share sale follows SoftBank’s investment in OpenAI’s earlier $40 billion primary funding round. OpenAI brought in about $4.3 billion in revenue during the first half of 2025, which is roughly 16% more than what it made during all of last year, the Information reported this week.

The sale happens as major tech companies battle hard for AI talent by offering expensive pay packages. Meta is putting billions into Scale AI and hired its 28-year-old leader, Alexandr Wang, to run its new super intelligence division.

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