Jack Stubbs, Graphika's Chief Intelligence Officer, told Reuters, “This activity shows how China is able to quickly mobilize a range of actors who seed and amplify online narratives casting Beijing as surpassing the U.S. in critical areas of geopolitical competition, including the race to develop and deploy the most advanced AI technologies.”
He also added, “We've consistently seen overt and covert Chinese state-linked actors among the first movers in leveraging AI to scale their operations in the information environment."
Even more so, Grpahika said that they also found a video featuring pro-China and anti-western content on a YouTube channel whose activity resembled the Shadow Play, which is a coordinated influence campaign that involves multiple YouTube Channels that were first identified as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2023.
Alphabet, Meta, X, and the Chinese embassy from Washington, D.C did not respond to the request to comment.
Graphika also stated for Reuters that a small spike in discussion about DeepSeek’s advancements in relation to OpenAI’s ChaGPT on X was found moments after DeepSeek released its model on January 20th.
Only in a few days, DeepSeek’s free AI assistant had overtaken its US competitor, ChatGPT in the number of downloads from the app store, as well as many investors left the US tech stock, making $593 billion disappear from Nvidia’s market value, marking the biggest drop in the company’s history.
Even more so, shares of Microsoft, another major investor in OpenAI that operates data centers, had a slower cloud revenue growth than what was expected on Wall Street.