The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was initially concerned about the rise of social media, considering it a threat to the regime. The CCP has since come to embrace social media as a way to influence domestic and foreign public opinion in the CCP's favor. Even as Beijing blocks foreign social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter (now X), from operating in China, it actively seeks to leverage these and other platforms for both overt propaganda and covert cyber-enabled influence operations abroad. While the results have been limited so far, the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) could dramatically improve China's capabilities moving forward, posing a greater threat to global democracies. Most research into Chinese social media manipulation focuses on its outputs to understand what Chinese actors are saying and doing on foreign social media. However, this research can analyze only what has already occurred and has been attributed to Beijing. This report contributes to public understanding of the CCP's foreign social media manipulation by exploring the inputs of Chinese strategy, operational planning, and capability development and looking forward to the potential implications of generative AI for Chinese social media manipulation. The authors leverage extensive original Chinese-language open-source primary materials to examine how the Chinese military approaches social media manipulation. Specifically, they focus on a Chinese military-affiliated researcher, Li Bicheng, to understand how the Chinese military has conceptualized and operationalized its approach to cyber-enabled influence operations.

In recent years, China's aspiration for global technology leadership has driven its significant investments in artificial intelligence (AI) for national security, economic growth, and societal well-being. Although there is increasing research and analysis on China's domestic AI development ecosystems and drivers, the details of China's development-financed AI exports remain elusive. Despite being the single-largest provider of foreign development assistance, Beijing does not participate in aid or debt transparency initiatives. To address this gap, researchers from the RAND Corporation and AidData jointly built a new database on China's AI export projects that are funded with official development financing: China's AI Exports Database (CAIED). CAIED uses data from multiple public databases and indexes related to China's global financing and recipient countries' electoral democracy, freedom, and data protection and privacy status. In this report, the authors analyze this quantitative dataset — adding qualitative country case studies based on interviews and social media analysis — to examine the distribution, technology, financing, and data safety aspects of China's AI exports.

With average annual commitments reaching $85 billion, the Chinese government is now the world's largest provider of development financing. Supported by large funding, many Chinese technology companies can deploy state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) tools in development contracts in recipient countries. The AI exports facilitated by these arrangements are likely to bolster China's growing global AI technology-related supply chains, trade flows, technology standards, and regulatory systems. This report is the technical documentation for the China's AI Exports Database (CAIED), which is a tool that tracks Chinese government–supported development finance projects that used or enabled AI technology in the Global South between 2000 and 2017. The goal of the report is to explain the motivation, data source, and methodology of building the tool. This report also presents a detailed codebook for the database and explanations on how to use the interactive world map and country selector. CAIED was built on AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance (GCDF) Dataset version 2.0. Using advanced data mining tools, the authors identified 155 projects enabling AI exports and described their characteristics in rich detail. Users can filter the world map by AI technology categories associated with the development finance projects and learn further details of the exported China AI project by clicking on the country of interest.

With average annual commitments reaching $85 billion in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) era, China has been one of the world's largest providers of development financing. Funded entirely or partially by China's official sector institutions, Chinese technology companies deploy state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in many BRI recipient countries. The AI exports facilitated by these arrangements are expected to bolster China's growing global AI technology-supported supply chains and trade flows. These AI tools, as they become embedded in different countries' public and private systems could help China to influence global technology standards and regulations. The China AI Exports Database (CAIED) tracks Chinese government-supported development finance projects that utilized or enabled AI technology in the Global South between 2000 and 2017. It was built on AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance (CGDF) Dataset Version 2.0. Using the latest data mining tools, we identified 155 projects qualified as either an AI Application or as AI Infrastructure (i.e. critical infrastructure for AI applications, or a tool that enables AI applications to be adapted in the future). The CAIED also includes country governance information such as the regime type to demonstrate associations between AI technology use and governance systems.

The world may remember 2022 as the year of generative artificial intelligence (AI): the year that large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-3, and text-to-image models, such as Stable Diffusion, marked a sea change in the potential for social media manipulation. LLMs that have been optimized for conversation (such as ChatGPT) can generate naturalistic, human-sounding text content at scale, while open-source text-to-image models can generate photorealistic images of anything (real or imagined) and can do so at scale. Using existing technology, U.S. adversaries could build digital infrastructure to manufacture realistic but inauthentic (fake) content that could fuel similarly realistic but inauthentic online human personae: accounts on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook that seem real but are synthetic constructs, fueled by generative AI and advancing narratives that serve the interests of those governments. In this Perspective, the authors argue that the emergence of ubiquitous, powerful generative AI poses a potential national security threat in terms of the risk of misuse by U.S. adversaries (in particular, for social media manipulation) that the U.S. government and broader technology and policy community should proactively address now. Although the authors focus on China and its People's Liberation Army as an illustrative example of the potential threat, a variety of actors could use generative AI for social media manipulation, including technically sophisticated nonstate actors (domestic as well as foreign). The capabilities and threats discussed in this Perspective are likely also relevant to other actors, such as Russia and Iran, that have already engaged in social media manipulation.