Operation “Nine–emdash Line”: Regional influence activity

This case study was originally published in OpenAI’s October 2025⁠(opens in a new window) report.

Actor

We banned a small network of ChatGPT accounts potentially affiliated with a covert influence operation originating from China and using our models to generate content for a cross-platform covert influence operation. The accounts mostly generated English-language social media posts about Vietnam’s alleged environmental impact in the South China Sea, English-language posts that criticized Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, and Cantonese-language social media posts about political figures and activists involved in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. To a lesser extent, this operation also generated English-language content about political issues in the US.

The social media accounts distributing the content bore some resemblance to the long-running China-origin operation known as “Spamouflage”, whose use of ChatGPT we wrote about in May 2024, but we did not identify technical links between these operations. Some of the videos shared in the latest posts were previously identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in an operation that also shared similarities with earlier Spamouflage activity.

Behavior

A focus of this network appeared to be bulk generating social media posts involving countries that have territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea / West Philippines Sea. China claims sovereignty to most of this region via a sweeping boundary known as the ‘Nine-Dash Line’, which has been disputed under international law and has been rejected by Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries. Given that context and the operation’s use of AI-generated text that included em-dashes in its posts, we have named this operation ‘Nine—emdash line’. These posts were mostly distributed on X.

Tweet consisting of content – and em-dash – generated by this operation using our models.

TikTok post consisting of text generated by this operation using our models.