# Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia

The operators used ChatGPT to generate multilingual social posts promoting the International Burke Institute, a fake think tank hosting plagiarized research and pro-Russia rankings.

- Operators prompted in Russian via VPNs to generate English and German posts on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn while instructing models to hide linguistic origins.
- The network generated logos, Russian-language summaries, and commentary for a dozen Telegram channels targeting Germany, France, Poland, Türkiye, and the US.
- The underlying website fabricated its roster with real scholars and misattributed stolen academic papers to appear legitimate.
- OpenAI rated the campaign at the lower end of Category Three on the Brookings Breakout Scale due to limited social audience engagement.

## Why it matters

Platform operators and security teams gain threat intelligence on how covert actors use LLMs to support fabricated institutional fronts rather than generating full narratives directly.

## Sources

- [OpenAI: Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia](https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-uses-of-ai-influence-campaign-russia)

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Summarized by dstilled on 2026-08-25. https://dstilled.ai/story/d6706b1f-82cf-48fd-9112-0d7907b9c815