China’s sinister ‘Trojan horse’ that has already breached America’s gates and scooped up YOUR data

China’s most dangerous technology has already been deployed, and you’re probably already in the system’s database, according to a new book.

Social media giant TikTok and AI giant DeepSeek — both apps made in China — are “Trojan horses” employed by the Chinese Communist Party to harvest sensitive data on Americans, Wynton Hall writes in his upcoming book “Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.”

AI and social media companies track users’ keystrokes, IP addresses, habits, browsing history and more – a threat that could help China create profiles on US citizens for things like spying, influence campaigns or surveillance.

TikTok has around 150 million monthly active users in the United States, while DeepSeek has far fewer, estimated at around 4 million monthly active users, according to ElectroIQ.

The platforms serve as “data voids,” Hall told the Daily Mail. Data retrieved from apps can include users’ typing cadence and finger positioning, providing a detailed digital footprint of the person using the phone.

“Tragically, America’s digital doors were breached long ago with the CCP’s first Trojan horse, TikTok,” Hall writes. “After years of exposure to Chinese ‘mind 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 United States realize the extent to which Chinese social media technology has functioned as a surveillance app, “collecting the personal data of one in three Americans.”

U.S. officials fear that China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law — which requires citizens and organizations to cooperate with state intelligence efforts — could allow Beijing to demand Americans’ data from the company or use it as a spying 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 voids” to collect data on American citizens, possibly to advance the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance goals.

TikTok tracks user keystrokes, finger positioning, habits, IP address and much more. Lawmakers warned it was a propaganda tool

AI application DeepSeek shook global markets in early 2025 when it was reported that the Chinese AI company had created technology capable of rivaling the largest US AI companies for a fraction of the price. The news caused NVIDIA, an American AI company, to lose more than $590 billion in value in a single day.

DeepSeek and TikTok can also be used as propaganda tools, 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 ​​company can “manipulate information to align with CCP propaganda.”

“The AI ​​chatbot DeepSeek is another tool of the CCP to censor information and promote propaganda,” California Congresswoman Young Kim said last year.

Both platforms have been banned by lawmakers concerned about their surveillance capabilities.

A ban on TikTok was passed by Congress before Trump struck a deal with the company’s ownership to keep it available in the United States by changing its ownership structure to be primarily made up of American investors.

Trump used TikTok during his 2024 campaign to connect with young voters and is proud to have “saved” the app in the US after it was banned.

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, was forced to sell its majority stake to a consortium of American investors to remain operational in the United States.

The deal was finalized in January 2026, giving ByteDance only a 19.9% ​​stake in exchange for $14 billion, Axios reported.

Meanwhile, legislation targeting DeepSeek has been introduced but has not passed at the federal level. Some states have banned the use of DeepSeek on government devices.

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met at a summit in October 2025. The two leaders worked on the deal that kept TikTok operational in the United States.

“In just a few days, DeepSeek’s chatbot rose to the top of US app stores, surpassing ChatGPT in number of downloads. Millions of Americans, attracted by its impressive capabilities, installed the open source LLM. In doing so, they unwittingly provided him 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’ typing patterns and rhythms, any American using DeepSeek on an insecure platform is effectively surrendering their privacy and security to the Chinese regime,” Hall writes.

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI whiz, 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 company burst onto the scene in early 2025 – claiming to match US giants like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic at a fraction of the price – it plunged the US tech market.

On January 27, 2025, Nvidia – the world’s most valuable company – saw its shares fall by around 17%, erasing around $590 billion in market value in a single day, the largest loss in history.

It later emerged that training DeepSeek’s R1 model likely cost close to a billion dollars – far more than initially reported – but the damage was done.

Within days, DeepSeek’s chatbot rose to the top of U.S. app stores, surpassing ChatGPT in downloads as millions of Americans installed the open source model, unwittingly forwarding their personal messages, work documents, and private conversations to it.

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 this, the company acknowledges, is stored in China.

The episode shook Washington.

Trump called it “a wake-up call to our industries: We need to focus on competition.” It also came amid a years-long escalation of Chinese espionage threats against the United States.

There were 55 CCP-related espionage cases in twenty states between February 2021 and August 2024, according to a 2024 Congressional report.

They involve the transmission of sensitive military information, theft of trade secrets and obstruction of justice, among other offenses.

“If you don’t think the Chinese Communist Party can change this algorithm to make it information that reflects their views, then I don’t think you understand the nature of the threat.” Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee said in 2024.

TikTok may be “the most powerful propaganda tool ever created,” he added.

Even Chinese officials have noticed what a powerful 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’ designed to lure America’s youth with addictive algorithms and dopamine-fueled content,” Hall writes.

Hall suggests that federal and state employees be banned from DeepSeek because of its intelligence-gathering capabilities.

“As for TikTok, the jury is still out on whether implementing the new US deal will end the myriad security risks that triggered the TikTok ban in the first place.

“The surest way to stop the CCP Trojan horses is to not let them through the gates,” Hall told the Daily Mail.