ChatGPT Accuses Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao of Ties to CCP

The hyped AI chatbot ChatGPT has accused Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao of ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in what the crypto exchange believes to be a disinformation campaign against the company.

Patrick Hilmann, the chief strategy officer (CSO) of Binance, said on Twitter that the exchange had received numerous requests in recent weeks inquiring if the founder and CEO of Binance was an official in the Chinese ruling party. This included a flurry of inquiries from congressional offices on Thursday.

To all the crypto and AI sleuths out there, here is the ChatGPT thread if someone wants to dig in. As you'll see ChatGPT pulls this from a fake LinkedIn profile and a non-existent @Forbes article. We can't find any evidence of this story nor the LinkedIn page ever existing. pic.twitter.com/szLaix3nza

— Patrick Hillmann 🤷🏻‍♂️👉 (@PRHillmann) May 1, 2023

ChatGPT Sources from Non-Existant Pages

According to the reports, the inquiries cited a ChatGPT conversation that accuses Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as CZ, of being a member of CCP before his entrepreneurial journey.

Patrick Hillmann was able to recreate the ChatGPT conversion that said that CZ was a member of the Youth League Committee during his employment in the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). He worked as a software developer at the CNPC.

ChatGPT referred to a LinkedIn profile and a 2018 Forbes article when asked about the source of information. According to the exchange’s CSO, both sources do not exist. When notified about the error, the AI chatbot continued to insist that CZ was a member of CCP.

“We can’t find any evidence of this story nor the LinkedIn page ever existing,” Hillmann wrote. However, only the default GPT-3.5 model produced this erroneous response. The other two models of the bot produced the correct response.

These allegations have also come at a time when Binance is under several regulatory investigations and legal threats from US regulators. Binance has been accused of ties to China in the past as well.

As reported, Binance has recently been alleged to hide significant links to China for several years despite executives’ claims that the exchange had left the country in 2017 due to a regulatory crackdown.

According to Hilmann, someone is engaged in a disinformation campaign against the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and its CEO. These malicious activities are part of a broader effort to damage its reputation and negatively affect its business operations.

Since the rise of ChatGPT, advanced AI-powered chatbots have been central to disinformation concerns. Many in the tech space have raised their concerns about the potential misuse of these tools to spread convincing fake information.

Hillmann said they respond to many stupid inquiries, but this was special and needed addressing. “We respond to A LOT of stupid inquiries here, but this is really special,” he wrote.

Hillmann concluded:

“However, like any new technology, bad actors will try and take advantage of it in the early days for profit or political gain. I hope raising awareness of issues like this prevents people from sole-sourcing an AI-generated response when seeking to disparage someone.”

There has been no response from the CZ himself yet.