(TibetanReview.net, Aug17’26) – Researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology tested ChatGPT when it was still a new technology and their findings, published in 2023, said the chatbot generated a large amount of “biased commentary about China” and “would not evade or refuse to answer political questions about China.” To Beijing, this meant that Western views are likely to prevail when it comes to issues like human rights and the status of Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing, reported the nytimes.com Aug 17, citing analysts.
To fix what it sees as a strategic vulnerability, China wants to not only build more powerful AI tools but also become a leading supplier of data — the troves of text, images and videos — that train AI systems around the world, so that narratives and points of view with all their propaganda distortions would prevail.
And so, earlier this year, China’s National Data Administration unveiled a blueprint to transform the country into a data powerhouse by the end of 2028. The plan proposed creating “high quality” data sets in more than two dozen strategic fields, including scientific research, industrial manufacturing and autonomous vehicles, the report said.
The plan envisages China sharing its data sets worldwide. Last month, it pledged to share data to help the dozens of developing countries that attended the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai build their own AI systems. As a matter of fact, China has also already released huge troves of data curated by government labs and state-owned media, making them available for download around the world, the report noted.
The goal, analysts have said, is twofold: to draw more users into China’s AI orbit and to narrow the gap with the United States in access to high-quality training data, which Beijing believes is helping America maintain its lead.
“Competition in the AI era is not only about models and computing power, but also about a high-quality data supply,” Yu Xiaohui, president of the state-affiliated China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, was stated to have written in an article published last month on the data administration’s website.
China is already flush with data from the government’s mass surveillance apparatus and the hundreds of millions of people who use the country’s biggest tech platforms. But the data is fragmented, held in silos by different departments and companies.
As a result, Chinese labs struggle to find enough useful data for their models, Xiaomeng Lu, a director at Eurasia Group, a risk-management consultancy, has said. That is one reason why they rely heavily on the process known as distillation, in which researchers collect data from powerful systems and use that data to build their own models. This led to US companies like Anthropic complaining that their Chinese competitors are unfairly copying their technology.
“Resolving domestic hurdles for data flows is China’s top priority,” Ms Lu has said. The data administration has said in its plan that it wants those silos to be broken up so that government, business and academia can share data.
Part of the Western analysts’ concern in all this is the fact that China’s efforts to export its data would expand the influence of the Communist Party’s propaganda as well as its ability to drown out information Beijing considers unsavory.
“The downside of this will be that it gives greater power for authoritarian states to dictate a chatbot’s values,” Alex Colville, a cyber expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has said.
Chinese AI models must adhere to strict rules to ensure they do not stray from the party’s official narratives. Popular Chinese chatbots like the one developed by DeepSeek, for example, evaded answering sensitive questions about Mr Xi and Beijing’s “zero Covid” policies, even when queried using software to circumvent the country’s internet controls, the report noted.
Researchers have already found that Chinese state narratives have seeped into the data that trains American models like ChatGPT and Claude, the report said, citing a recent study published in Nature.
“What AI does is it disconnects the messenger from the message,” Brandon Stewart, a professor of sociology at Princeton and one of the study’s authors, has said. “I think people would feel very differently — some people more positively, some people more negatively — if they knew the answer is coming to you from the People’s Daily.”
It is one thing for Chinese state media to influence AI models indirectly. But China also wants its data — which in some cases carry official narratives — to be part of the raw material used to build models, the report said.
China’s effort also builds on the embrace of low-cost Chinese AI models that perform nearly as well as more expensive American models. These data sets could be attractive to users in developing countries where Chinese AI models have made major inroads, Kenton Thibaut, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies Beijing’s role in global technology, has said.
“This is part of providing the technological lock-in that is good for Chinese companies and good for Beijing’s influence,” Ms Thibaut has said. “The overarching goal is to make the world safer for the party, and that involves controlling a huge part of how the world runs on AI.”