OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts used to spread pro-Kremlin content including a think tank with researchers who say they were falsely affiliated
Fortune Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez ● Covered by 2 sources
OpenAI banned ChatGPT accounts it says were running a pro-Russia influence push through a fake think tank. The twist: the site used real researchers’ names and misattributed papers to borrow credibility.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI says it shut down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts tied to what it describes as a pro-Russia operation. The accounts allegedly used VPNs to get around the company’s ban on Russian users, then used ChatGPT to pump out social posts for the International Burke Institute, a think tank that says it is an “expert community” based in Israel. OpenAI calls the institute the core of the operation.
The Burke Institute’s website is still online, and that’s where the mess gets stranger. OpenAI says the site claims contributors such as Noam Chomsky and Francis Fukuyama, though neither responded immediately to Fortune. One writer listed on the site reportedly had no idea her name was being used until Fortune asked about it. Other names on the roster belonged to people who had died before the institute was founded, including Shlomo Avineri and Jiang Ping.
OpenAI says the site was registered in February 2025 and also carried a “sovereignty index” that favored Russia. Its review found 34 of 36 articles were real academic pieces lifted and assigned to the wrong authors. One example shown by OpenAI was a migration governance article taken from the Migration Policy Institute and credited to Kate Howell, a University of Melbourne food science professor, with a headshot pulled from the internet. After OpenAI published its blog post, the article’s byline was changed to Kate Hooper, one of the real authors.
Susan Ariel Aaronson, another academic listed as an expert, told Fortune she had nothing to do with the Burke Institute and called the situation disturbing. She said trust in AI governance matters, and this kind of muddy operation only drains it. The institute pushed back after Le Monde reported on OpenAI’s claims, saying use of its name or its index by third parties was not proof of cooperation or funding.
OpenAI says some posts promoting the institute came from branded accounts, while others came from fake people on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Substack and Telegram. The individual accounts drew little attention, the company said, but Telegram channels still picked up between 10,000 and 20,000 followers each. It’s a small audience with a very large appetite for nonsense, which is exactly why these influence jobs keep getting built this way.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the modern propaganda playbook: steal credibility first, argue later. OpenAI banning the accounts matters, but the real scandal is how easy it still is to launder fake authority through real names, real papers and a tidy website. The internet never really fixed gullibility; it just gave it better formatting.
Read more about this at: Fortune
