Around midnight on April 16, 2025, after Chen Zimo learned that the Department of Homeland Security had threatened to revoke Harvard University’s certification to enroll international students, he began communicating with a trusted source about possible legal scenarios. Chen, a Chinese citizen, still needed a number of courses before he could complete his degree in computer science at Harvard, and he felt panicked about the possibility of having his visa revoked. For him, the Harvard experience had been transformative. Chen—not his real name—had grown up in provincial China, where his family had modest resources and sent him to public schools. He could never have afforded Harvard without the university’s generous financial support, and he had also received funding for summer language study. Nevertheless, when Chen heard about the D.H.S. letter, his first response wasn’t to contact a Harvard administrator, or the university’s International Office, or the law school. Instead, he logged into ChatGPT.
By chance, a new model of ChatGPT, OpenAI o3, had been released the same day that Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, sent the letter to Harvard. ChatGPT includes a “Deep Research” tool that is trained to solve more complex problems by synthesizing large amounts of online information and then presenting answers in more detail. Chen submitted a two-part request:
The chatbot wrote back:
Chen instructed ChatGPT to “find the context online.” After it was clear that this was really happening, and that a representative of the U.S. government had threatened to take steps to expel every international student at America’s oldest institution of higher education, the chatbot responded:
I first met Chen in 2021, when I was living in China. At the time, he impressed me as remarkably mature and thoughtful, and in April, 2022, when I made a visit to Cambridge, we met again, in Harvard Yard. Chen said that, before coming to the United States, he had been skeptical about government overreach with surveillance, in part because of the case of Edward Snowden. But he gained a new respect for American rule of law after one of his classes focussed on issues of privacy and surveillance.
“For one unit, we discussed Section 702, a foreign-surveillance program by the U.S. government,” he told me. “Although I personally hate any kind of surveillance program, from the reading material I sort of got amazed by the review process and the supervision process of this program. For instance, first they have made the distinction between U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. And also the foreigners inside the U.S. have the same protections as the U.S. persons. The only eligible target is foreigners outside the U.S.”
Chen had been impressed when he read a range of articles that engaged in vigorous debate about the program. “One argued that privacy is a basic human right,” he said. “You can never find this kind of serious debate about the Great Firewall in China.”
He often found himself making comparisons between the U.S. and his home country. It bothered him that Chinese university students rarely examined issues of privacy in a critical manner, and sometimes even supported censorship. “I think this has something to do with insufficient civic education in China,” he said.
Chen held strong opinions about the political system in China, but he was careful about what he said to other people, in person and on social media, even at Harvard. He told me that he was concerned that other Chinese students might jubao, or “report,” him to authorities on the other side of the Pacific. “I honestly feel sad about this,” he said. “It’s a limit on your thought. You are constantly thinking about whether you can express your ideas.” For similar reasons, he had grown to dislike the general uniformity of liberal student thinking at Harvard. “I got more negative about America with the political correctness,” he told me, explaining how his thinking had evolved during his first year. He believed that many Harvard students self-censored because they didn’t want to appear to hold different ideas from the majority on campus. “Extreme political correctness is not benign to the society,” he said.
On the whole, though, Chen had been happy with his introduction to American life. Some things that had initially mystified him, like the tendency for pedestrians in Cambridge to cross streets against traffic lights, eventually bothered him less. “Previously, I thought that everybody in developed countries follows the rules,” he told me.
A little more than a week ago, I spoke with Chen again, and I reminded him how positive he had been about the U.S. three years ago. “I can summarize my feelings about the American political system in three stages,” he said. He explained that I had seen him in Harvard Yard during the second stage, when his early skepticism about the U.S. had given way to more supportive feelings. Since then, Donald Trump had been reëlected, which had led to the third stage in Chen’s thinking.
“Initially, people, including myself, were expecting that Trump might do something crazy, but all the actions would still be on the normal range,” he explained. “Like what he did in the first term.” Chen now realized that such expectations had been wrong, and he described his new attitude about the American political system as “extremely skeptical.”
In part because Trump’s actions seemed so unprecedented, Chen turned to the in-depth analysis of ChatGPT-o3 with his questions about D.H.S. targeting Harvard’s international students. After about twenty minutes, the program provided Chen with the detailed breakdown that it had promised:
That evening, Chen stayed awake until 4 A.M., sending follow-up questions to the chatbot. “It predicted the worst-case scenario,” he told me. When he asked about the possibility of the government revoking Harvard’s S.E.V.P. certificate, ChatGPT provided a detailed schedule. “There should be a fifteen- or thirty-day grace period for all the international students under Harvard to change, transfer, or leave the country,” Chen said, summarizing the chatbot’s analysis. “But, theoretically, D.H.S. could say that we don’t have the grace period and everybody should be kicked out.” Chen said that it was also theoretically possible that ICE would start arresting students, but the chatbot had told him this was extremely unlikely. It also made it clear that Harvard had a number of legal solutions to these various scenarios.
In the course of the evening, ChatGPT compiled a thirty-two-page document, complete with time lines, potential scenarios, and estimated percentages of the likelihood of certain things occurring. The process helped Chen feel calmer. “After working with it for four or five hours, I felt like there was nothing I should be too worried about,” he told me. The chatbot ended with a section entitled “Take-away for students”:
When Chen and I spoke on May 23rd, it had been more than a month since the chatbot conversation, and thus far the machine-generated scenarios had been accurate. “Today, Harvard filed a complaint, and they got a temporary restraining order,” he said. “I read the news half an hour ago.” He explained that this was exactly what the chatbot had predicted would happen. He continued, “Yesterday I think I might have been worried for three minutes, but then I felt O.K., because I already knew what might happen based on ChatGPT. I was enjoying socializing with my friends.”
Chen told me that he still hoped to stay in the U.S. after finishing his degree. “At this moment, I don’t want to go back to China, because the political system is still there,” he said. “It’s not the kind of environment I would be comfortable with. My priority is that I will still try to find a job in the U.S. and have some entrepreneurial experience. But if it doesn’t work out—say that Trump really succeeds in retaliating against Harvard, or that he does something that makes everybody lose confidence in the U.S.—then I might move to Europe, or I might move elsewhere in Asia.”
In recent weeks, I’ve been corresponding with a number of Chinese acquaintances about the current situation in the United States, and I’ve been struck by how many people seem calm. To some degree, it’s counterintuitive: many Americans feel helpless and disturbed by what’s going on, so one might expect that Chinese people, who are often the target of Trump’s policies, ranging from tariffs to tightened immigration, would be even more distressed. But the Chinese have been toughened by prior experience with capricious and authoritarian-minded governments. “Email might not be the safest channel to discuss this,” one of my former students, now enrolled in a Ph.D. program at an American university, wrote to me recently. “But my current data security measures for U.S. platforms are up to par with my Chinese ones now.”
Another former student, who is middle-aged, told me that Trump reminds him of the worst parts of his own country’s modern history. “He’s like a version of Mao Zedong in his eighties,” he wrote. “Trump is supported by America’s poorly educated lower classes. It feels like he’s launched a Cultural Revolution of his own in the U.S., damaging his people and causing damage around the world. Here in China, we call him 特不靠谱, which means ‘Extremely Unreliable.’ People also mock his administration as a 草台班子, ‘grassroots troupe’—a term we use to describe an unprofessional and amateur team.”
Trump’s apparent lack of strategic thinking often stands out to Chinese observers. One young woman I taught a few years ago now works for a large Chinese retailer that’s connected to markets around the world. “As for stress from Trump tariffs, I believe it exists, but not too heavy,” she wrote me. “After Trump won the election, and even earlier, our company was making some adjustment in factories, such as searching for factories in other countries like Vietnam.” She had noticed that older and more experienced figures in management at her company seemed sanguine about the trade war. “I used to ask our colleague who is in charge of overseas business about the opinion towards Trump tariffs,” she wrote. “He told me that he believes no country in this world can totally detach from the Chinese supply chain, because products made in China are representative of low cost, fast speed, and high quality. He has confidence [that we will] pull through this special situation.”
