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

Date:
Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:30:00 +0000

Description:
The International Burke Institute was central to the social influence campaign, designed to paint Russia in a better light than its Western counterparts.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter 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. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: 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 Germanys 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. You may like ChatGPT accounts
linked to Asian scam banned by OpenAI OpenAI says suspected fake China-linked accounts tried to sway the debate about US data centers OpenAI says its
models escaped a sandbox and breached Hugging Face

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. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners
or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms &
Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

The Indexs 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. What to read next Experts warn ChatGPT's Workspace Agent Builder can be hijacked to create malicious AI workers ChatGPT joins Microsoft, Google in most-impersonated brands online Experts explain why OpenAI's 'mind-blowing' cyberattack should worry us all

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 works 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.



======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/openai-says-it-took-down-a-malicious-ru ssian-plan-to-spread-misinformation-on-chatgpt


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 (Linux/64)
* Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100)