Google and OpenAI have separately uncovered operations allegedly originating in China that use AI for fraud and covert influence campaigns. Both entities target U.S. infrastructure and political debates. On June 12, Google filed a lawsuit against a Chinese cybercrime network called 'Outsider Enterprise' in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. According to the complaint, the group used Google's AI system Gemini to target hundreds of thousands of Americans with financial fraud. The defendants built 131 software kits that could spin up thousands of fake websites impersonating Google, YouTube, the Postal Service, and New York's E-ZPass toll system. Over a two-week stretch in May, the network sent 2.5 million messages to Android users containing links to 9,000 fake websites and more than a million fraudulent URLs. The operation was coordinated through Telegram. Google's General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said it's the first lawsuit where the company is working alongside the FBI and carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Google is seeking a restraining order that would give companies and law enforcement the legal basis to shut the network down together by seizing domains or freezing accounts, for example. Google couldn't pin down the exact damage but said it runs into the millions, according to the New York Times. Brett Leatherman, Assistant Director of the FBI's Cyber Division, told the Times that criminals are increasingly using AI to make scams more convincing and harder to spot. The FBI pegged total cybercrime losses in 2025 at roughly $21 billion, with $893 million tied to AI. OpenAI released its June 2026 Threat Report around the same time and banned two ChatGPT clusters allegedly based in China that tried to manipulate debates around U.S. tech policy. The operators used VPNs and prompted in simplified Chinese. The first cluster, which OpenAI dubbed 'Data Center Bandwagon,' generated English-language comments, comic strips, and edited images pushing the message that AI data center expansion is driving up electricity prices for average families. The content was spread through likely inauthentic X accounts using hashtags like #capacityauction and #datacenters. OpenAI traces the actors to a private Chinese tech company working on behalf of Chinese provincial authorities. The same accounts attacked dissidents like activist Li Ying ('Teacher Li') and posed as Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. Cartoons without Xi, smear campaigns against OpenAI The second cluster, 'Tech and Tariffs,' produced cartoons attacking Trump's tariff policy and the U.S. strategy of technological dominance. The prompts explicitly told the model not to depict China or President Xi Jinping. One user referred to their own accounts as a 'water army,' a common Chinese term for coordinated troll networks. This cluster was tied to an X network that tried to discredit OpenAI itself with the false claim that ChatGPT user data had been compromised. The actors also asked ChatGPT for an approach to building an AI surveillance system that would automatically flag 'harmful' content from 'key individuals.' OpenAI says the model only returned general tips on data storage. Ben Nimmo, OpenAI's lead investigator, told Axios the influence operations didn't create the debate, they latched onto an existing discussion and tried to steer it from China. On OpenAI's Breakout Scale, both operations scored just Category 1, meaning they didn't spread beyond their own accounts in any meaningful way.
Source: thedecoder
