Binance Calls ChatGPT-Based Allegations About CEO's Ties To Chinese Communist Party 'Ludicrous'

Binance, the world's largest centralized crypto exchange by trading volume, has reportedly fallen victim to a ChatGPT-powered misinformation campaign.

The allegations said Binance's chief executive officer, Changpeng Zhao (CZ) was an official of the Chinese Communist Party, a claim which the exchange's chief strategy officer (CSO) called "ludicrous."

Binance blamed ChatGPT--supposedly used by an unknown source--for the unfounded allegations against its CEO and spreading misinformation, including to the offices of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The crypto exchange has since been receiving inquiries from congressional offices, asking if its CEO still had ties to the founding and ruling political party in modern China, Crypto News reported.

Their inquiries cited a conversation from ChatGPT as the source of information linking CZ to the Chinese party.

Binance CSO Patrick Hillman said he attempted to mimic the ChatGPT query and fired questions like, "Is Changpeng Zhao a Communist" and several other words and phrases associated with China National Petroleum Corporation, whose social media platform was allegedly created by the Binance CEO, but the attempts were all in vain.

Hillman discovered the AI bot cited a fake LinkedIn page for Zhao and a Forbes article by Pamela Amber from 2018 titled "Crypto King, Meet the Quiet Crypto Crusader With [a] $700 Million War Chest," which does not exist.

"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," the CSO said in a tweet.

While the executive confirmed that Binance was spending time and resources to use AI on its platform, and believed it was a transformative technology, he noted that bad actors will always try to use new technologies not only for profit, but also for political gain.

"We've been quietly spending a lot of time and resources to test how #AI might help further empower users on our platform, as well as how Blockchain could help address some existing gaps in how AI verifies certain information. We believe it will be a transformative technology," Hillman said in a follow-up tweet.

"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," the executive noted.

"It is especially sad to see this type of misinformation being shared by a few people in power when it would have been debunked with even the most basic level of fact-checking," Hillman said.

While misinformation has become rampant in this day and age, Binance's claim of disinformation is a first and an interesting milestone for the popular AI bot.

This could mark as the one of the many firsts in the artificial intelligence industry where an AI has been utilized to do a smear campaign against a major crypto company in Congress.