OpenAI on Tuesday said it banned a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts that used VPNs to bypass access restrictions and run an influence operation, which relied on its artificial intelligence (AI) tool to generate social media posts and comments that were shared on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The accounts “were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described ‘expert community’ based in Israel,” the company said.
“What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a ‘sovereignty’ index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators’ Russian origins.”
The campaign is assessed to have reached “relatively small audiences,” with Telegram channels attracting more users and amassing about 10-20,000 followers each. The majority of the generated content was in English and the operators instructed ChatGPT to conceal any linguistic clues that could allude to their Russian provenance.
The IBI brand is associated with a website (“ibi[.]institute”) that was registered in February 2025. It claims to be a community of leading experts from across the world in matters of economics, politics, sociology and international relations.
There is no evidence that articles published on the site were created using ChatGPT. However, many of them seem to have been copied from academic writings, in some cases with false attribution, while others were seemingly drafted by a Slavic speaker and then machine translated to English.
What’s more, OpenAI said the covert campaign is distinct from already documented Russia-linked influence operations, its notable aspect being the creation of a sovereignty index that was promoted by the so-called think tank to project Russia favorably and criticize Western countries.
The website explains the Sovereignty Index, also called the Burke Index, is calculated by taking into account seven indicators that span account political, economic, technological, information, cultural, cognitive, and military sovereignty.
“Each of the 7 areas of sovereignty is calculated using equalization coefficients based on a maximum score of 100 points, which in turn is formed from official national and global data sources and expert assessments,” the website states. “The sum of 7 indices in the range of 100-700 forms the final Cumulative Sovereignty Index.”
The IBI website also includes reports on different countries and their sovereignty, as measured by the index. The U.S. leads the list with a score of 650.9, followed by China at 649.1, Switzerland at 610.7, and Russia at 601.4. The report on Russia includes the following assessment –
In 2025, Russia is a state with a high level of sovereignty and record military and economic self-sufficiency, a strong scientific and cultural base, but with limited flexibility of the civilian economy and dependence on internal administrative capital.
The main vectors of strengthening are demography, investments in high technologies and gradual liberalization in non-military science and innovation. The sovereignty profile indicates that by 2025 Russia has established a stable and high level of national sovereignty, from financial and military self-sufficiency to digital and cultural control over the internal environment.
The country has become one of the three world powers with full digital and military nuclear sovereignty. Demographic aging, innovation constraints, and selective global integration remain key challenges, requiring a balance between closure and modernization.
The activity extended beyond generating content about IBI, as one of the ChatGPT users used the tool to create a profile picture for a Telegram channel named “American Observer” and repeatedly asked for Russian-language summaries of the channel activity.
“The significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built,” OpenAI said. “While the actors only used ChatGPT to produce isolated promotional posts, those posts pointed to an otherwise credible-appearing institution, complete with purported experts, republished academic work and a purported proprietary risk index.”
“This illustrates how influence actors can use AI as a supporting tool within a broader effort to manufacture authority, obscure the source of favored narratives, and establish assets that could be scaled over time. It also illustrates how their supporting use of AI can lead to the broader operation being exposed.”
