The company said a Chinese operation had built the tool to identify anti-Chinese posts on social media services in Western countries.
Mr. Nimmo and his team believe the Chinese surveillance tool is based on Llama, an A.I. technology built by Meta, which open sourced its technology, meaning it shared its work with software developers across the globe.
In a detailed report on the use of A.I. for malicious and deceptive purposes, OpenAI also said it had uncovered a separate Chinese campaign, called Sponsored Discontent, that used OpenAI’s technologies to generate English-language posts that criticized Chinese dissidents.
The same group, OpenAI said, has used the company’s technologies to translate articles into Spanish before distributing them in Latin America. The articles criticized U.S. society and politics.
Separately, OpenAI researchers identified a campaign, believed to be based in Cambodia, that used the company’s technologies to generate and translate social media comments that helped drive a scam known as “pig butchering,” the report said. The A.I.-generated comments were used to woo men on the internet and entangle them in an investment scheme.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
