China’s most dangerous technology has already been deployed, and you’re likely already within the system’s database, according to a new book.
Social media giant TikTok and AI behemoth DeepSeek – both Chinese-made applications – are ‘Trojan Horses’ employed by the Chinese Communist Party to scrape up sensitive data on Americans, writes Wynton Hall in his forthcoming book ‘Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.’
The AI and social media companies track users’ keystrokes, IP addresses, habits, browser history and more – a threat that could help China build profiles on US citizens for things like espionage, influence campaigns, or surveillance.
TikTok boasts approximately 150 million active monthly US users while DeepSeek has substantially less, estimated to be around 4 million monthly active users, per ElectroIQ.
The platforms serve as ‘data vacuums,’ Hall told the Daily Mail. The data retrieved from apps can include users’ typing cadence and finger positioning, providing a detailed digital fingerprint of who is using the phone.
‘Tragically, America’s digital gates were breached long ago with the CCP’s original Trojan horse, TikTok,’ Hall writes. ‘After years of exposure to Chinese ‘mental warfare,’ propaganda, and data collection, the hope now is that TikTok, at a minimum, will finally be forced into American ownership and control.’
Hall writes that few people in the US realize how China’s social media technology have functioned as a surveillance app, ‘collecting personal data from one in three Americans.’
US officials fear China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law – which compels citizens and organizations to cooperate with state intelligence efforts – could allow Beijing to demand Americans’ data from the company or use it as a espionage tool.
Author Wynton Hall writes in his upcoming book ‘Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI’ that TikTok and DeepSeek serve as ‘data vacuums’ to pick up data on US citizens, possibly to advance the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance objectives
TikTok tracks user’s keystrokes, finger positioning, habits, IP address and more. Lawmakers have warned its a propoganda tool
AI app DeepSeek rattled global markets in early 2025 when it was reported that the Chinese AI firm made technology capable of competing with top US AI companies for a fraction of the price. The news caused NVIDIA, a US AI firm, to lose over $590 billion in value in a single day
DeepSeek and TikTok can be used as propaganda tools, too, according to the House Select Committee on the CCP, which says the social media app’s algorithm can be adjusted to display certain content and the AI firm can ‘manipulate information to align with CCP propaganda.’
‘AI chatbot DeepSeek is another CCP tool to censor information and promote propaganda,’ California Congresswoman Young Kim said last year.
Both of platforms have faced bans from lawmakers concerned about their surveillance abilities.
A TikTok ban was passed by Congress before Trump struck a deal with the company’s ownership to keep it available in the US by shifting its ownership structure to be primarily comprised of American investors.
Trump famously used TikTok in his 2024 campaign to connect with younger voters and has taken pride in ‘saving’ the application in the US after it was banned.
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company to TikTok, was forced to sell off its majority stake to a consortium of US investors to stay operational in the US.
The deal was finalized in January 2026, giving ByteDance just 19.9 percent ownership in exchange for $14 billion, Axios reported.
Legislation targeting DeepSeek, meanwhile, has been introduced but not adopted federally. Some states have passed bans on DeepSeek being used on government devices.
President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping together at a summit in October 2025. The two leaders worked on the deal that kept TikTok operational in the US
‘Within days, DeepSeek’s chatbot vaulted to the top of US app stores, overtaking ChatGPT in number of downloads. Millions of Americans, drawn by its impressive capabilities, installed the open- source LLM. In so doing, they unwittingly supplied it with their personal messages, business documents, creative works, and private conversations,’ Hall writes in the book
‘Given DeepSeek’s aggressive data collection protocols, which include monitoring users’ keystroke patterns and rhythms, any American using DeepSeek on a nonsecure platform is effectively surrendering their privacy and security to the Chinese regime,’ Hall writes.
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI wunderkind shocked US markets and caused the world’s most valuable company, NVIDIA, to lose half a trillion dollars in a single day.
When the Chinese AI firm burst onto the scene in early 2025 – claiming to match US giants like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost – it sent the US tech market into a nosedive.
On January 27, 2025, Nvidia – the world’s most valuable company – saw its stock plummet roughly 17 percent, wiping out approximately $590 billion in market value in a single day, the largest such loss in history.
It later emerged that training DeepSeek’s R1 model likely cost close to $1 billion – far more than initially claimed – but the damage was done.
Within days, DeepSeek’s chatbot vaulted to the top of US app stores, overtaking ChatGPT in downloads as millions of Americans installed the open-source model, unwittingly handing it their personal messages, business documents and private conversations.
The app’s privacy policy reads like a surveillance wish list: usernames, email addresses, phone numbers, passwords, chat histories, device information, IP addresses and even individual keystroke patterns.
All of it, the company acknowledges, is stored in China.
The episode rattled Washington.
Trump called it ‘a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing.’ It also landed amid a years-long escalation in Chinese espionage threats against the United States.
There were 55 CCP-related espionage cases across twenty states between February 2021 and August 2024, a 2024 congressional report states.
They involve transmitting sensitive military information, the theft of trade secrets and obstruction of justice, among other infractions.
‘If you don’t think the Chinese Communist Party can twist that algorithm to make it the news that they see reflective of their views, then I don’t think you appreciate the nature of the threat.’ Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee said in 2024..
TikTok is perhaps ‘the most powerful propaganda tool ever,’ he added.
Even Chinese officials have noted how powerful of a tool TikTok is.
‘Colonel Dai Xu, a professor at the People’s Liberation Army National Defense University (PLA- NDU), described platforms such as TikTok as a ‘modern day Trojan Horse’ engineered to lure American youth with addictive algorithms and dopamine- driven content,’ Hall writes.
Hall suggests that federal and state-level employees be banned from DeepSeek due to its intelligence gathering capabilities.
‘As for TikTok, the jury is still out on whether the new U.S. deal’s implementation will end the myriad security risks that ignited the TikTok ban in the first place.
‘The safest way to stop CCP Trojan horses is to not let them enter the gates to begin with,’ Hall told the Daily Mail.
