By former Representatives Loretta Sanchez and Greg Walden
Imagine waking up to a world where entire chapters of history have quietly disappeared and key facts about important news are simply nowhere to be found. If you search online for details of major events, you’re met with error messages and misleading narratives. If you dig deeper, you run into censorship, or even total lockouts.
To those of us fortunate enough to live in the United States, this all sounds like dystopian fiction. But for hundreds of millions of people living under the control of authoritarian regimes, this is an everyday reality.
A new study from The American Edge Project shows how real this danger is. It reveals that China is weaponizing artificial intelligence (AI) to systematically rewrite history, erase human rights abuses and filter out any criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
When asked about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, one leading Chinese AI system falsely claimed “no one was killed, and there was no massacre.” Another program labeled well-documented reports of deaths “untrue” before simply censoring itself mid-discussion.
When it comes to human rights, the study found that searches about the repression of Uyghurs were dismissed as “baseless” or even abruptly cut short. Meanwhile, the same AI models that freely criticized former President Biden clammed up when asked about CCP leader Xi Jinping. One model actually admitted that it “can’t comply with that request.”
These are not technical mistakes or glitches. They are the result of a deliberate effort by the CCP to inject their authoritarian values of censorship and control into the very technologies that will shape our future. The implications could not be more profound.