Russia used ChatGPT to run a covert influence campaign pushing pro-Kremlin narratives across the West
OpenAI has exposed a covert Russian influence campaign that used ChatGPT to generate social media posts and disrupted it by banning a cluster of ChatGPT accounts.
The operators accessed the platform from Russia through VPNs and instructed ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues pointing to their Russian origin. The campaign's goal was to promote the "International Burke Institute" (IBI), a think tank supposedly based in Israel. Among other things, the IBI published a "sovereignty index" that ranked Russia favorably while making Western countries look worse by comparison.
According to OpenAI, 34 of 36 expert-linked IBI articles published between September 2025 and May 2026 were copied from other sources, some with fake author credits. One article from Cambridge University Press was falsely attributed to a professor at the University of Nottingham, and a piece from the Migration Policy Institute was credited to an Australian food chemistry professor.
Low reach, but scalable infrastructure
The campaign spread posts across X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack, and Telegram. Some of that content was in German, posted to a Telegram channel called "Lahme Ente" ("Lame Duck") that criticized Ukraine, the EU, and the German federal government while pushing for closer ties with Russia. A second operator created logos for about a dozen Telegram channels focused on Germany, the US, France, Poland, and Turkey and regularly requested Russian-language summaries of channel activity.
Individual posts got very few views, and the official IBI accounts had low subscriber counts, according to OpenAI. The linked Telegram channels, however, each reached 10,000 to 20,000 followers. On the Brookings Breakout Scale, OpenAI rates the campaign at category three out of six, meaning it spread across multiple platforms with early signs of reaching real users. The campaign's current reach stayed small, but OpenAI says the elaborate infrastructure behind it could have been scaled up over time.
OpenAI has previously disrupted several Russian influence operations abusing ChatGPT. In June 2024, the company exposed a Russian network called "Bad Grammar" that used its models to generate political comments on Telegram about Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. A year later, OpenAI identified "Operation Helgoland Bite," another Russian campaign that used ChatGPT to produce German-language content ahead of Germany's 2025 federal election, attacking the US and NATO while promoting the AfD party. These are only the cases OpenAI caught on its own platform. With Chinese AI providers and open-weight models freely available, the actual scale of AI-powered influence operations is likely much larger.
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