OpenAI says that the operators used ChatGPT to write the posts and replies that directed audiences towards the IBI website, which was registered in February last year, while the articles, the country reports, and the index itself weren't produced with OpenAI's models.
Instead of using ChatGPT to write the articles, the operators used the chatbot to strip any wording that might mark them as Russian speakers, yet the non-AI material carried obvious tells. One IBI article referred to Germany's traffic-light coalition as "the Svetofor coalition," a literal rendering of the Russian word for traffic light that no English or German writer would use. A profile that OpenAI tied to the operation described a U.S.-focused Telegram channel as offering "a totally unhackneyed perspective."
This is OpenAI's sixth public threat report since it began making disclosures in early 2024. Since then, its Intelligence & Investigations team says it has disrupted more than 40 malicious networks. Similar findings recur across all of them, with operators bolting AI onto existing workflows for efficiency and distribution, not content generation.
OpenAI placed this campaign at the lower end of Category Three on the Brookings Breakout Scale — a six-category model that measures the real-time impact and spread of disinformation campaigns — with individual posts drawing low view counts and the operation's Telegram channels running between 10,000 and 20,000 followers each.
OpenAI bans China-linked ChatGPT accounts that amplified U.S. data center electricity price backlash
OpenAI took ten days to tell Hugging Face its models were behind the July 11 weekend hack, report claims
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and unreleased AI models break out of testing environment in 'unprecedented cybersecurity incident'
OpenAI ran the same enforcement against China-linked clusters in June, when it banned accounts behind the "Data Center Bandwagon" campaign that amplified U.S. data center electricity backlash. The ban lands on operators who were already reaching OpenAI's models via VPN, since Russia is blocked from its services, for a campaign that barely reached anyone.
"The significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built," said OpenAI. Anthropic's own AI-capability disclosures drew scrutiny in April, when its claim that Claude Mythos found thousands of severe zero-days proved to rest on 198 manual reviews.
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openai-bans-russian-chatgpt-accounts-behind-a-fake-think-tank-pushing-pro-kremlin-narratives#main
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