OpenAI has announced the closure of several ChatGPT accounts that it claims are associated with Chinese government organizations. According to the platform, the accounts were shut down after users tried to get help creating tools to track and monitor social media activities.
The company released its latest public threat report explaining that some people had asked the chatbot to create a social media listening tool and other monitoring systems. The request, according to OpenAI, broke its national security rules. The company said its findings pointed to how generative AI might be misused as the United States and China continue their race to control how the technology grows and what regulations cover it.
OpenAI said many of the accounts that it closed used Chinese language and had deployed the chatbot to help with phishing attacks and malware operations. These accounts had asked the model to look into many ways to automate tasks using China’s DeepSeek system.
OpenAI disrupts multiple malicious networks
According to a report from Reuters, OpenAI also claimed it shut down accounts linked to suspected Russian-speaking criminal organizations that used the chatbot to help build certain types of malware. Since OpenAI started publishing public threat reports in February of last year, the Microsoft-backed company has stopped and reported more than 40 networks.
Its AI models have turned down clearly harmful requests, the company said. “We found no evidence of new tactics or that our models provided threat actors with novel offensive capabilities,” the company stated in the report. OpenAI now serves more than 800 million people who use ChatGPT each week, according to a previous Cryptopolitan report. Last week, the company became the most valuable startup in the world after finishing a secondary share sale that valued it at $500 billion.
The number is up from its earlier $300 billion value, showing how fast OpenAI has grown its user numbers and income. The deal let OpenAI employees sell their shares to a group of investors. This group included Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price, according to a source who could not speak publicly about the matter. The company allowed more than $10 billion worth of stock to be sold on the secondary market, the source said.
The share sale follows SoftBank’s investment in OpenAI’s earlier $40 billion primary funding round. OpenAI brought in about $4.3 billion in revenue during the first half of 2025, which is roughly 16% more than what it made during all of last year, the Information reported this week. The sale happens as major tech companies battle hard for AI talent by offering expensive pay packages. Meta is putting billions into Scale AI and hired its 28-year-old leader, Alexandr Wang, to run its new super intelligence division.
