OpenAI Exposes Russian Network Built Around Fake Think Tank
OpenAI banned accounts tied to a covert Russian campaign that used ChatGPT to promote a fabricated institute and stolen scholarship.
A manufactured source of authority
OpenAI says it disrupted a previously unreported Russian influence operation that used ChatGPT to promote the International Burke Institute, or IBI, a purported Israel-based expert community. The company banned a cluster of accounts that it assessed as very likely originating in Russia and accessing its service through VPNs.
The operators used ChatGPT chiefly to produce English and German social-media posts, comments and promotional material distributed across X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack and Telegram. Prompts written in Russian instructed the model to remove linguistic clues about the users’ origin. One operator also generated logos for a dozen Telegram channels targeting audiences in Germany, the United States, France, Poland and Türkiye.
The campaign’s more consequential component existed outside ChatGPT. IBI presented named experts, academic-looking articles and a proprietary “sovereignty index” that praised Russia while attacking Western governments. OpenAI reviewed 36 articles associated with the site and found 34 had been copied from elsewhere; some were assigned to the wrong authors. The institute also claimed an Israeli address, while its promotional network tried to conceal Russian involvement.
Limited reach, reusable infrastructure
OpenAI said most individual posts attracted little attention, although some related Telegram channels had between 10,000 and 20,000 subscribers. It placed the operation at the lower end of Category Three on the Brookings Breakout Scale, indicating activity across several platforms with some exposure to authentic audiences. The company did not establish the relationship between the Russian operators and several real individuals who may have represented IBI at conferences or in article submissions.
The case matters because generative AI was not the campaign’s central propaganda engine. It supplied inexpensive multilingual promotion for a larger apparatus designed to manufacture institutional credibility. That division of labor makes detection harder: copied scholarship, invented affiliations and apparently independent social accounts can lend authority to narratives without requiring AI-generated flagship content.