OpenAI Bans Russian ChatGPT Accounts Behind Fake Think Tank Pushing Pro-Kremlin Narratives

OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts posing as a fake Israeli think tank -- used VPNs to push pro-Kremlin narratives and steal academic papers for its website

A fake Israeli think tank credited migration-policy research to an Australian professor of food science, ran a "sovereignty index" that scored Russia above the countries criticizing its war, and filled its site with academic papers lifted from their real authors. OpenAI banned the cluster of ChatGPT accounts behind it on August 25, tracing the operation back to Russia, where operators used VPNs to reach models blocked in the country and drafted mostly English-language posts promoting the outlet across Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Of 36 articles OpenAI sampled from the International Burke Institute, as the outlet called itself, 34 were copied from real academics, some misattributed to figures including Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky. OpenAI says that the operators used ChatGPT to write the posts and replies that directed audiences towards the IBI website, which was registered in February last year, while the articles, the country reports, and the index itself weren't produced with OpenAI's models. Instead of using ChatGPT to write the articles, the operators used the chatbot to strip any wording that might mark them as Russian speakers, yet the non-AI material carried obvious tells. One IBI article referred to Germany's traffic-light coalition as "the Svetofor coalition," a literal rendering of the Russian word for traffic light that no English or German writer would use. A profile that OpenAI tied to the operation described a U.S.-focused Telegram channel as offering "a totally unhackneyed perspective." This is OpenAI's sixth public threat report since it began making disclosures in early 2024. Since then, its Intelligence & Investigations team says it has disrupted more than 40 malicious networks. Similar findings recur across all of them, with operators bolting AI onto existing workflows for efficiency and distribution, not content generation. OpenAI placed this campaign at the lower end of Category Three on the Brookings Breakout Scale -- a six-category model that measures the real-time impact and spread of disinformation campaigns -- with individual posts drawing low view counts and the operation's Telegram channels running between 10,000 and 20,000 followers each. OpenAI ran the same enforcement against China-linked clusters in June, when it banned accounts behind the "Data Center Bandwagon" campaign that amplified U.S. data center electricity backlash. The ban lands on operators who were already reaching OpenAI's models via VPN, since Russia is blocked from its services, for a campaign that barely reached anyone. "The significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built," said OpenAI. Anthropic's own AI-capability disclosures drew scrutiny in April, when its claim that Claude Mythos found thousands of severe zero-days proved to rest on 198 manual reviews. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Slop factory bans Russians for using slop factory to create slop

ChatGPT may spew a lot of digital garbage onto the internet, but the same bots that output the trash can be used to stop it. The company draws the line at influence operations that want to slop in the name of love . . . of mother Russia. OpenAI said in a Tuesday blog post that it had identified a cluster of accounts originating from Russia using ChatGPT to produce social media posts and comments directing internet denizens to what appears to be a fake Israeli think tank critical of the west and supportive of Russia. "What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation," OpenAI said in its report on the ban of the accounts and what it had found. That said, it appears the Russian efforts were still largely ineffective. "Although the campaign appears to have reached relatively small audiences, its elaborate construction distinguishes it from other Russia-linked influence operations we have disrupted," the company added. OpenAI further noted that it doesn't allow access to its platforms from Russia, but it's easy to subvert that ban with a VPN account. OpenAI found posts from the Russian ChatGPT operation on a number of platforms, with Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn all playing host to the slavic slop. Most of the comments generated by the Russian actors were in English, but since OpenAI has access to every interaction between its AIs and the account holders, it knows the prompts were all in Russian and included instructions to ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that might clue English speakers off to the fact that the original text was in Russian. That said, those attempts to mask awkward translations don't appear to have been particularly successful, with OpenAI pointing out several awkward phrases used in English-language posts by the group behind the misinformation op. In one case, a passage describing a German coalition of socialists, liberals, and greens was described as the "Svetofor coalition," a term used in some slavic languages to refer to those parties' colors in reference to traffic lights. The fact it wasn't translated into "traffic-light coalition," or the German "Ampelkoalition," makes it obvious the original came from a slavic speaker, OpenAI said. In another case, the description of a Telegram channel pretending to be an American political news source is filled with gibberish, including the claim it provides "a totally unhackneyed perspective on hazzy," whatever that may be. In many cases, the Russian op attempted to direct users to research pieces from the International Burke Institute (IBI), a think tank that claimed to be headquartered in Israel, but which appears to be a completely fictional operation. "In a review of a sample of 36 articles linked to experts on the IBI website and published between September 2025 and May 2026, 34 of the articles were copied from elsewhere on the internet," OpenAI said. "Some of these articles were years old; others were attributed to the wrong authors." In one glaring instance, a supposed migration policy expert named in a misattributed paper was actually a food sciences professor from Australia. None of the papers on the IBI's site were linked to ChatGPT generation in any way, OpenAI noted. The IBI's most glaring feature, according to the OpenAI writeup, was its "sovereignty index," which relied on some internal IBI calculation that was uniformly critical of western countries who were at odds with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and used language that was "typically critical, veering into the polemic" against its targets, OpenAI said. All said, Russia's antics using OpenAI to generate social media posts related to the campaign were largely pointless, the company said. "The operation's immediate impact appears to have been limited: typical social media posts only received low numbers of views, and the official IBI accounts had low subscriber numbers," per OpenAI. "The significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built." In other words, misuse of AI was just a part of what seems to be a much larger scheme. "Influence actors can use AI as a supporting tool within a broader effort to manufacture authority, obscure the source of favored narratives, and establish assets that could be scaled over time," OpenAI said. We've known this for a while now, but apparently OpenAI is finally getting wise to the fact that the creation it unleashed on the world might not be entirely beneficial. But hey, what AI unleasheth, AI can also help solve, obviously - according to OpenAI, use of its tools in the creation of misinformation might actually be a good thing for hunting it down, as what the company found "illustrates how ... use of AI can lead to the broader operation being exposed." There. Now maybe you can be thankful that everything you ask an AI bot gets recorded on a tech company's servers in perpetuity. ®

OpenAI Bans Russian ChatGPT Accounts Used to Run Influence Operation

OpenAI on Tuesday said it banned a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts that used VPNs to bypass access restrictions and run an influence operation, which relied on its artificial intelligence (AI) tool to generate social media posts and comments that were shared on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. The accounts "were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described 'expert community' based in Israel," the company said. "What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a 'sovereignty' index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators' Russian origins." The campaign is assessed to have reached "relatively small audiences," with Telegram channels attracting more users and amassing about 10-20,000 followers each. The majority of the generated content was in English and the operators instructed ChatGPT to conceal any linguistic clues that could allude to their Russian provenance. The IBI brand is associated with a website ("ibi[.]institute") that was registered in February 2025. It claims to be a community of leading experts from across the world in matters of economics, politics, sociology and international relations. There is no evidence that articles published on the site were created using ChatGPT. However, many of them seem to have been copied from academic writings, in some cases with false attribution, while others were seemingly drafted by a Slavic speaker and then machine translated to English. What's more, OpenAI said the covert campaign is distinct from already documented Russia-linked⁠ influence operations, its notable aspect being the creation of a sovereignty index that was promoted by the so-called think tank to project Russia favorably and criticize Western countries. The website explains the Sovereignty Index, also called the Burke Index, is calculated by taking into account seven indicators that span account political, economic, technological, information, cultural, cognitive, and military sovereignty. "Each of the 7 areas of sovereignty is calculated using equalization coefficients based on a maximum score of 100 points, which in turn is formed from official national and global data sources and expert assessments," the website states. "The sum of 7 indices in the range of 100-700 forms the final Cumulative Sovereignty Index." The IBI website also includes reports on different countries and their sovereignty, as measured by the index. The U.S. leads the list with a score of 650.9, followed by China at 649.1, Switzerland at 610.7, and Russia at 601.4. The report on Russia includes the following assessment - In 2025, Russia is a state with a high level of sovereignty and record military and economic self-sufficiency, a strong scientific and cultural base, but with limited flexibility of the civilian economy and dependence on internal administrative capital. The main vectors of strengthening are demography, investments in high technologies and gradual liberalization in non-military science and innovation. The sovereignty profile indicates that by 2025 Russia has established a stable and high level of national sovereignty, from financial and military self-sufficiency to digital and cultural control over the internal environment. The country has become one of the three world powers with full digital and military nuclear sovereignty. Demographic aging, innovation constraints, and selective global integration remain key challenges, requiring a balance between closure and modernization. The activity extended beyond generating content about IBI, as one of the ChatGPT users used the tool to create a profile picture for a Telegram channel named "American Observer" and repeatedly asked for Russian-language summaries of the channel activity. "The significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built," OpenAI said. "While the actors only used ChatGPT to produce isolated promotional posts, those posts pointed to an otherwise credible-appearing institution, complete with purported experts, republished academic work and a purported proprietary risk index." "This illustrates how influence actors can use AI as a supporting tool within a broader effort to manufacture authority, obscure the source of favored narratives, and establish assets that could be scaled over time. It also illustrates how their supporting use of AI can lead to the broader operation being exposed."

OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts used in covert misinformation campaign

* OpenAI said on Tuesday it had banned pro-Russia ChatGPT accounts that were being used in an online "influence campaign." * The incident was discovered after the company investigated AI-generated social media posts, which led it to a "much broader influence operation." * It's the latest reported incident of pro-Russia actors using AI to spread misinformation. In this article * OPENAI.FG Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia that it said were being used to support a covert online influence campaign to spread misinformation. The company discovered the issue after investigating AI-generated social media posts, which led it to a "much broader influence operation," OpenAI said in a blog post on Tuesday. The campaign was "built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a 'sovereignty' index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators' Russian origins," the company added. It's the latest incident of pro-Russia actors using AI to spread misinformation. OpenAI does not allow access to its models in Russia, but the company said VPNs were used to disguise location. In February, OpenAI said it had shut ChatGPT accounts that were connected to Rybar, a pro-Russia media company the UK government describes as "partially co-ordinated by the Presidential Administration," funded by Russian state corporation Rostec and working with members of the Russian intelligence services. CNBC has contacted the Russian embassy in London and Russia's Foreign Ministry for comment. Pro-Russia influence campaign The operators prompted in Russian to generate social media comments that were posted on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn, and instructed ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian, OpenAI said. Much of the content generated promoted an organization called the International Burke Institute (IBI), the website of which features articles copied from real academic writing, sometimes with false attribution. The influence campaign also created a "sovereignty index," OpenAI said, which praised Russia and denigrated Western countries. While the immediate impact of the operation appeared limited, the company added, the "significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built." ChatGPT-produced posts pointed to an "otherwise credible-appearing institution, complete with purported experts, republished academic work and a purported proprietary risk index," OpenAI said. "This illustrates how influence actors can use AI as a supporting tool within a broader effort to manufacture authority, obscure the source of favored narratives, and establish assets that could be scaled over time," the company added. "It also illustrates how their supporting use of AI can lead to the broader operation being exposed." Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

OpenAI says it took down a malicious Russian plan to spread misinformation on ChatGPT

* OpenAI says it has disrupted a social media influence campaign that is believed to be of Russian origin * What makes this campaign stand out is the underlying architecture, which features a "think tank" with highly questionable credibility * The objective of the campaign was to influence Western audiences into believing Russia was superior, and that Western countries were sacrificing their sovereignty AI tools have once again been used for bad, rather than for good, and this time it has been as part of a campaign attributed to Russia that tried to discredit Western countries supportive of Ukraine. The threat actors used ChatGPT accounts to promote the work of an "expert community" of academics known as the International Burke Institute (IBI). The site used stolen academic works attributed to the wrong authors in an attempt to appear legitimate while also hiding the true source of its academic 'contributions'. The IBI was registered to an address in Israel - with some evidence suggesting real individuals in Israel represented and promoted the page - but the main purpose of the misinformation campaign was to paint Russia in a favourable light compared to its Western adversaries. International Burke Institute, or an institute run by international berks? In its report on the campaign OpenAI points out that those behind the ChatGPT accounts used to promote the page took careful steps to hide their Russian origins. Many of the prompts included instructions to hide any linguistic clues that the operators used Russian language prompting. One inclusion on the IBI website referred to Germany's traffic light coalition as the "Svetofor coalition". Svetofor is the word for 'traffic light' in numerous Slavic languages, including Russian, indicating that drafts were written in Slavic languages before being translated. Some of the accounts were used to promote the IBI across X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack and Telegram with AI generated imagery and captions, with other accounts being used to automatically engage with comments by real users on Substack. The operators of the ChatGPT accounts regularly requested performance summaries of these pages in Russian, and used ChatGPT to generate matching profile pictures for some accounts. Burke Sovereignty Index One of the features of the IBI website is to advertise the 'Burke Sovereignty Index' - designed to measure how well a country performs compared to others across political, economic, technological, informational, cultural, cognitive and military factors. The Index's purpose is to make Western countries appear worse than Russia, OpenAI says. Having taken a look at the Index myself it's clear there is no consistency in measurement or comparison. For example, The Vatican City - which is less than half a square kilometer in size - sits above Spain in its average of scores. The Index also gave Russia the highest military score. Questionable expert contributors The website also includes a list of experts, whose affiliation to the IBI is not referenced. Some among them are pioneers in their fields of study, such as Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky. Others are former high-ranking members of the US government, such as Mike Pompeo and Joseph Nye. There are even listings for experts who passed away before the IBI was founded, such as Shlomo Avineri and Jiang Ping. Much of the academic work cited on the IBI website is legitimate, but more often than not has been stolen from its actual author and misattributed to a different author to hide the work's actual source, OpenAI said. This has been done to give the IBI website credibility and to make it appear authentic. Impact of the IBI influence campaign The overall impact of the IBI and its promotion using social media and ChatGPT is fairly limited, OpenAI noted. Some of the Telegram channels garnered followings between ten to twenty thousand showing a limited breakout to authentic audiences. But the main thing to take away from this is the level of dedication placed behind the underlying infrastructure of the IBI. The site is designed to look authentic, uses authentic research (even if it is wrongly attributed), and presents itself as a collection of experts. To the layman, a cursory glance at the IBI website would give any of their social media presence a level of authenticity not seen in other social influence campaigns. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts used to spread pro-Kremlin content including a think tank with researchers who say they were falsely affiliated | Fortune

OpenAI banned a "cluster" of ChatGPT accounts that it claims were part of a pro-Russia operation aimed at bashing Western countries and promoting a think tank with misattributed academic research. The company said in a blog post this week that the banned ChatGPT users used VPNs to get around its restriction on Russian users and then used its tech to create social posts promoting the International Burke Institute, a think tank that describes itself as an "expert community" based in Israel, but which OpenAI says is the "core" of a Russian influence operation. According to OpenAI, the think tank, the website of which is still online, claims to include among its contributors notable figures like American linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky as well as American political scientist and author Francis Fukuyama. Neither Fukuyama nor Chomsky responded immediately to requests for comment from Fortune. One such author who was listed on the site didn't know the website was using her name until Fortune reached out for comment. Other listings include experts who passed away before the IBI was founded, such as Shlomo Avineri and Jiang Ping. OpenAI said the website, which was registered in February 2025, also included a "sovereignty index" that favored Russia as well as dozens of articles with misattributed authors. A scan by Fortune of the Burke Institute's website on the Wayback Machine reveals that while it existed as of February last year, nothing was published on the page prior to October 2025. The institute, in response to reporting by French outlet Le Monde on OpenAI's claims, doubled down with a statement that said it rejected the idea it was not a legitimate think tank. "The fact that third parties use or cite an IBI publication, the Institute's name, or findings from the Sovereignty Index does not, in itself, constitute evidence of cooperation, coordination, funding, or a common underlying purpose." The Burke Institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune sent to the email listed publicly on its website. OpenAI said that according to its research, a handful of individuals in Israel represented the Burke Institute in interviews and at conferences. Using real researchers' names The AI company's review of the Burke Institute's articles found 34 of 36 were real academic articles misattributed to other authors. A screenshot published by OpenAI showed a legitimate article on the Burke Institute's website on migration governance that was taken from the Migration Policy Institute but misattributed to Kate Howell, a professor of food science at the University of Melbourne, with a headshot taken from the internet. Since OpenAI published its blog post, the website changed the article's attribution to one of the real authors, Kate Hooper, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Hooper did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Another professor listed as an expert on the Burke Institute's website was Susan Ariel Aaronson, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. A legitimate article she authored for the Centre for International Governance Innovation was posted on the website with a link to download. Yet, Aaronson, who is also a co-principal investigator for the NSF-NIST Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS), told Fortune she was not associated in any way with the Burke Institute. Reached by phone, she said the situation was disturbing. "Trust is really important in the governance of AI, and here you have this really weird, you know, situation causing substantial distrust, and so it's just really disturbing," she said. She also lamented that there is little regulation at the federal level to deal with such instances, and that it needs to be handled from the top. "The Trump administration is doing nothing to effectively govern it, and is governing AI in an opaque manner. That is opacity does not build trust," she added. Other articles on the Burke Institute's website appear to be translated into English from a Slavic language, based on clues like the use of the word "svetofor," which means traffic light in several Slavic languages, including Russian, according to OpenAI. The AI company claims the ChatGPT users created numerous social posts to promote the institute, some of which came from accounts with the International Burke Institute name and branding. Other posts came from made-up individuals that promoted the institute on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X as well as Substack and Telegram. OpenAI said posts from individual accounts "only received low numbers of views" and the official accounts for the institute had "low subscriber numbers." Still, on the instant messaging platform Telegram, the users were able to attract a larger audience of between 10,000 and 20,000 followers per channel. Despite what OpenAI claims is a small following, the company's findings show how Russia-linked actors have reportedly used AI to step up their propaganda campaigns. Earlier this year, OpenAI said it disrupted another operation it said originated in Russia, that used ChatGPT to generate German-language political content ahead of Germany's federal election. The campaign criticized the U.S. and NATO and distributed content through Telegram and X and created AI-generated material supporting Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Russian-speaking cybercriminals also used SpaceX's AI coding assistant Cursor to hack into a Belgian chemical company along with six other companies this year alone, according to a report by Reuters citing data from cybersecurity company Gambit Security. The company said in a blog post this week that the banned ChatGPT users used VPNs to get around its restriction on Russian users and then used its tech to create social posts promoting the International Burke Institute, a think tank that describes itself as an "expert community" based in Israel, but which OpenAI says is the "core" of a Russian influence operation.

OpenAI Suspends Russian ChatGPT Accounts Over Covert Social Media Influence Campaign - Meta Platforms (NA

OpenAI Uncovers a Covert Russian Influence Machine Using ChatGPT to Build Fake Expertise and Spread Pro-Moscow Narratives Across Social Media OpenAI has terminated a number of ChatGPT accounts from Russia, accusing them of participating in a clandestine online misinformation operation. The Sam Altman-led company discovered the issue while analyzing AI-generated social media posts, leading to the identification of a broader influence operation, according to an OpenAI blog post on Tuesday. The operation was primarily based around a website that hosted plagiarized and wrongly attributed academic work, a 'sovereignty' index favoring Vladimir Putin's Russia, and attempts to hide the operators' Russian roots, as per OpenAI. The operators leveraged Russian prompts to generate social media comments posted on platforms such as Substack, Telegram, Meta Platform Inc.'s (NASDAQ:META) Facebook, and LinkedIn. They also directed ChatGPT to mask any linguistic indications of their Russian origin. The majority of the generated content promoted an organization called the International Burke Institute (IBI). The IBI's website features articles copied from legitimate academic sources, sometimes falsely attributed. The influence operation also created a 'sovereignty index' that lauded Russia and criticized Western nations. While the immediate impact of the operation appears to be limited, OpenAI stressed that the operation's significance lies in the infrastructure it had established. The AI-generated posts pointed to a seemingly credible institution, complete with alleged experts, republished academic work, and a purported proprietary risk index. Tech Russia's Starlink Rival Could Erode Ukraine's Communications Edge as Moscow Ramps Up Satellite Deployment 'Much Faster Than Originally Planned' Ukraine warns of Russia's expanding Rassvet satellite network, which could rival Starlink and undermine Kyiv's battlefield advantage. 2 min read Read this article OpenAI Flags Rising AI Influence Risks OpenAI said AI can help influence actors build authority, hide the origins of narratives, and create scalable assets for long-term influence campaigns. Trending Get a 1% Match on Your First Deposit of $1,000+ In June, OpenAI said it disrupted multiple influence campaigns targeting U.S. debates over AI and data centers. One campaign, dubbed "Data Center Bandwagon," spread claims that AI data centers were driving up household electricity costs. Another group linked to a Chinese technology company with government ties allegedly sought to shape U.S. policy discussions. OpenAI also banned Chinese-speaking users who used ChatGPT to create anti-Trump slogans, cartoons and multilingual comments for social media and news platforms. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Tech Zelensky Pushes Elon Musk To Allow Starlink Over Russia, Says Expanded Satellite Coverage Could Reduce Moscow's Ability To 'Drag Out The War': Report Ukraine's president says Elon Musk may reconsider using Starlink over Russian territory, which could weaken Russia's military capabilities. 3 min read Read this article Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.