OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia that powered an unusually elaborate covert influence operation centered on a fake think tank called the International Burke Institute. The operators used the models to generate English-language social media comments promoting the IBI across Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, while deliberately instructing ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian. They accessed the platform through VPNs, since OpenAI blocks Russian access outright.
The operation’s most distinctive feature was a so-called “sovereignty index” designed to cast Russia in a favorable light while denigrating Western countries. That level of construction sets it apart from other Russia-linked influence campaigns OpenAI has disrupted since the war in Ukraine began. The IBI website, registered in February 2025, claimed to be based in Israel and boasted a roster of world-class experts—including names like Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky. But a review of 36 articles linked to those experts found that 34 were copied from real academic work, sometimes with false attribution. Some content appeared machine-translated from a Slavic language.
Beyond boosting IBI, the operators branched into German-language content. One generated posts for a Telegram channel called “Lahme Ente” (“lame duck”) that routinely criticized Ukraine, the EU, and the German government while pushing for better relations with Russia. A second operator generated logos for a dozen Telegram channels focused on Germany, the USA, France, Poland, and Türkiye, and repeatedly requested Russian-language summaries of those channels’ activity.
OpenAI reports the campaign reached relatively small audiences. That’s consistent with a pattern we’ve seen across these operations: the infrastructure is often more sophisticated than the actual reach. The real signal here isn’t the audience size—it’s the escalating complexity. A fake think tank with a custom index, copied academic papers, and multilingual channel networks represents a step up in tradecraft from the cruder bot farms typically associated with Russian IO. The question now is whether this is a one-off experiment or a template other operators will copy.
