Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia

What happened

Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We advance this mission by deploying our innovations to build AI tools that help people solve hard problems. This includes building tools that enable us to detect, investigate, disrupt and expose covert influence operations (IO): deceptive attempts to manipulate public opinion or influence political outcomes without revealing the true identity or intentions of the actors behind them.

The operation’s main use of ChatGPT was to generate social media posts that promoted articles on the IBI website. We identified these posts on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack and Telegram. Some were posted by accounts that bore the IBI name and logo; others appeared to come from everyday users (likely inauthentic) whose main activity consisted of posting IBI articles.

Alongside these proactive posts, the operators also generated replies to posts by real Substack users on a range of topics. These replies typically included a request to follow the IBI channel, and were posted on Substack by the IBI account. As well as generating content about IBI, one of the operators generated German-language posts that were posted on a Telegram channel called “Lahme Ente” (“lame duck”).

These posts routinely criticized Ukraine, the EU and the German government, and advocated for better relations with Russia. A second operator, alongside their IBI-related content, generated logos for a dozen Telegram channels (including Lahme Ente) focused on Germany, the USA, France, Poland and Türkiye. Some of these channels sometimes posted about IBI, or shared IBI’s own posts. The second operator also repeatedly asked for Russian-language summaries of these channels’ activity.

One of the US-focused channels, posing as an American outlet, featured a bio that included multiple indicators of non-native language. The core of this operation appeared to be the International Burke Institute (IBI), although the activity we disrupted was focused on social media content promoting or linking to the website rather than content hosted directly on its website.

The site presented itself as an “expert community” with a street address in Israel. As of 17 July, its website claimed a wide range of world-class experts, including luminaries such as Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky, and published a wide array of research.

Why it matters

We recently banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia that were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described “expert community” based in Israel.

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.

Although the campaign appears to have reached relatively small audiences, its elaborate construction distinguishes it from other Russia-linked⁠(opens in a new window) influence⁠(opens in a new window) operations⁠(opens in a new window) we have disrupted⁠(opens in a new window) since the start of the war in Ukraine. This report explains how the operation worked, where ChatGPT fit into it, and what we did to disrupt it.

We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia. The operators prompted in Russian to generate social media comments that were posted on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of the comments they generated were in English, and the operators instructed ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian.

As we do not allow access to our models from Russia, they used VPNs to access our platform. Much of the generated content was to promote a self-described “expert community” called the International Burke Institute (IBI). The IBI brand was associated with a website which was registered in February 2025. This site claimed that the Institute was based in Israel.

Articles published on the site were not generated from our models. Many were copied from real academic writings, sometimes with false attribution; some appear to have been drafted by a Slavic speaker and machine translated. As an example, the screenshot below from the IBI website uses an unnatural phrase that is most readily explained as a literal machine translation from a Slavic language.

This is, to the best of our knowledge, a new and previously unreported covert influence campaign. Its most notable feature is its creation of the “sovereignty index” promoted by the ostensible “think tank” to praise Russia and denigrate Western countries. This is the first time we have disrupted an influence operation tied to Russia that went to such elaborate lengths.

What to watch

However, 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. Some of these articles were years old; others were attributed to the wrong authors.

For example, one article on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor appears to have been copied from a Cambridge University Press original, but incorrectly attributed to a professor at the University of Nottingham whose expertise is in South Asian politics. Another article on migration governance appears to have been copied from the Migration Policy Institute, but misattributed to an Australian professor of food science.