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OpenAI banned Russian ChatGPT accounts used to spread pro-Kremlin misinformation

The accounts promoted a fake Israeli think tank complete with plagiarized academic articles and a "sovereignty index" that praised Russia

To get around OpenAI's prohibition on model access from Russia, the operators routed their connections through VPNs, the company said. Working in Russian, they used ChatGPT to draft social media content that appeared on Substack, Telegram, X $TWTR, Facebook $META and LinkedIn, while directing the model to remove any features of the text that might betray its origins. Most of the generated content was in English.

The campaign centered on an organization called the International Burke Institute, a self-described expert community whose website listed a street address in Israel. OpenAI said the site, registered in February 2025, falsely claimed to feature prominent academics including Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky. In a review of 36 articles linked to experts on the site and published between September 2025 and May 2026, 34 were copied from elsewhere on the internet, the company said — sometimes with incorrect attribution.