OpenAI Disrupts Russian Covert Influence Campaign

OpenAI has disrupted a covert influence operation originating in Russia that used ChatGPT to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a fraudulent "expert community" posing as an Israeli think tank. While the campaign's immediate reach was limited, its elaborate infrastructure—which included a fake sovereignty index and misattributed academic work—demonstrates a sophisticated attempt to manufacture authority and obscure the Russian origins of the narratives.

Russian Actors and AI Usage

Operators based in Russia used VPNs to bypass regional access restrictions and utilized ChatGPT to generate English-language social media content. To avoid detection, the operators specifically instructed the AI to remove linguistic clues that would reveal their Russian origins.

The AI was primarily used for the following activities:

Social Media Promotion: Generating posts on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack, and Telegram to drive traffic to the IBI website.
Engagement: Creating replies to real Substack users to encourage them to follow the IBI channel.
Targeted Narratives: Generating German-language posts for a Telegram channel called "Lahme Ente" ("lame duck") that criticized the EU, Ukraine, and the German government while advocating for improved relations with Russia.
Asset Creation: Generating logos for approximately a dozen Telegram channels targeting the USA, France, Poland, Türkiye, and Germany, and requesting Russian-language summaries of those channels' activities.

The International Burke Institute (IBI) Infrastructure

The core of the operation was the IBI website, registered in February 2025. The site attempted to establish legitimacy through several deceptive tactics:

Content Fabrication and Plagiarism

An analysis of 36 articles linked to experts on the IBI website published between September 2025 and May 2026 revealed that 34 were copied from other internet sources. These articles were often years old or misattributed to the wrong authors to create a facade of academic rigor. For example, one article was copied from Cambridge University Press but attributed to a professor at the University of Nottingham.

The Sovereignty Index

The IBI promoted a proprietary "sovereignty index" used to publish reports that praised Russia and denigrated Western nations. These reports were polemic in nature, criticizing the "Macronism" of France, the autonomy of the United States, and the dependence of Germany on American military bases.

Linguistic Indicators of Origin

Despite efforts to hide their identity, the operators left traces of their Russian origins. One IBI website article referred to Germany's "traffic-light coalition" as the "Svetofor coalition," using the Slavic word svetofor (светофор) for traffic light—a term highly unlikely to be used by native English or German speakers.

Impact and Assessment

OpenAI assesses the operation's impact as being at the lower end of Category Three on the Brookings Breakout Scale, meaning it spanned multiple platforms with some indications of breakout to authentic audiences.

While the official IBI accounts had low subscriber numbers, the associated Telegram channels were more successful, with some attracting between 10,000 and 20,000 followers each. OpenAI notes that the primary significance of this operation is not its reach, but the infrastructure built to manufacture authority. The use of AI as a supporting tool for promotional content provided the entry point that allowed the broader, non-AI-driven operation to be exposed.