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.
Russia's military scores 0.5 points higher than the US military, according to the IBI. | Image: Screenshot
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.
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