TikTok’s Chinese Owner Stole ChatGPT Secrets To Make Copycat AI—Report

ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company behind the short video app TikTok, has been accused of secretly using ChatGPT to develop its own commercial artificial intelligence for the Chinese market.

OpenAI, which owns the chatbot, suspended the Chinese tech giant’s developer account following the alleged violation of its terms of service, The Verge reported on Saturday.

The technology in question is the application programming interface, or API, behind ChatGPT, which enables coders to incorporate the AI into other apps. In its terms of service, OpenAI forbids clients from using the chatbot to “develop models that compete with OpenAI.”

Microsoft, the company ByteDance pays for access to the API, has the same policy.

The Verge’s Alex Health said he obtained access to internal ByteDance documents that showed the company had used ChatGPT at almost every stage of its own chatbot’s development, from training to performance evaluation.

ByteDance and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Newsweek’s separate written requests for comment by publication time.

ByteDance’s use of the Al was both intentional and extensive, according to The Verge, which said internal communications revealed that employees were seeking ways to obfuscate evidence of their ChatGPT use through “data desensitization.”

The TikTok owner instructed developers behind its “Project Seed,” most of whom were in China, to stop utilizing text generated by ChatGPT, but the service continued to be used in ways that violated OpenAI’s terms, including to review the performance of the alleged Chinese clone, a generative AI robot called Doubao, Heath said.

A ByteDance spokesperson acknowledged that ChatGPT-generated data had been used for annotating, or labeling, data for Project Seed. OpenAI told The Verge that ByteDance’s ChatGPT account was suspended pending an investigation.

AI is one of several key fronts in the U.S.-China rivalry to dominate emerging technologies.

Beijing hopes to boost its computing power by 50 percent by 2025, and in 2017 China’s State Council, its central government, laid out plans to achieve AI supremacy by the end of this decade.

Separately, TikTok—China’s most successful tech export by far—continues to come under intense scrutiny over national security concerns in the United States and elsewhere.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill want ByteDance to sell the popular app to an American company in order to ensure oversight of data security, or face an outright ban. TikTok told Newsweek earlier this year that divestiture would not resolve the issue.

As a Chinese company, ByteDance, is obliged to share data with Chinese authorities and store information in China. However, TikTok says it remains independent of any government’s influence.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told Congress in a March hearing that researchers from the University of Toronto had discovered no evidence of “overt data transmission by TikTok to the Chinese government.”

The researchers disputed his claim, saying they could not track the data once it reached the company’s servers.

Beijing has denied it would ever demand information on Americans from the tech giant, saying Washington’s worries amount to a witch hunt.

“The U.S. should stop spreading disinformation about data security, stop suppressing the relevant company, and provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for foreign businesses to invest and operate in the U.S.,” a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said at the time.

Meanwhile, a number of U.S. states have already banned ByteDance services like TikTok from government devices.

“It would be national self-suicide to allow the dominant media platform in America to be controlled, or at least be influenced by, the Chinese Communist Party,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), chairman of the House select committee on China, said last month.

TikTok was downloaded some 670 million times in 2022 alone, according to Statista.