ChatGPT as a Surveillance Assistant? An Exploratory Case Study of AI-Assisted Surveillance Risks

arXiv:2610.40890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can generate detailed guidance, functional code, and persuasive text at scale. As one of the most widely used consumer language model products as of 2026, ChatGPT gives broad public access to these capabilities, motivating concerns about its potential use in surveillance-related tasks. We present an exploratory case study of what potentially harmful surveillance assistance looks like in ChatGPT's public web interface. We contribute a taxonomy of seven surveillance risk categories based on prior LLM risk research and reports of deployed surveillance systems, instantiated as 110 prompts, along with a manually reviewed analysis of ChatGPT's responses.