OpenAI Disrupts Russian 'Burke Institute' ChatGPT Op, Scores 5/6

OpenAI says 34 of 36 sampled articles on the website of a self-styled Israel-based think tank were copied from elsewhere, sometimes attributed to authors who did not write them. The company announced on October 8 that it had banned ChatGPT accounts tied to the operation, rated it 5/6 on its own impact scale and called it "the most far-reaching influence operation it has disrupted," NBC News reported.

The front was the International Burke Institute, which presented itself as an "expert community" and listed Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky among its scholars. One article about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor had been lifted from a Cambridge University Press original and reassigned to a professor at the University of Nottingham. The institute also published a proprietary "sovereignty index" praising Russia and portraying the United States, the European Union, France and Germany as weak or subordinate to foreign interests.

OpenAI said "operators in Russia used VPNs to evade its prohibition on access from the country," then prompted ChatGPT in Russian to produce mostly English-language posts and comments, instructing the model to strip linguistic clues to their origin. The material went out across X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Substack and Telegram. Reach was uneven; most posts drew little engagement, though associated Telegram channels had up to 20,000 followers each. The cluster, which OpenAI ties to a network it calls Politology, pursued three workstreams: denigrating Ukraine and the recruitment pipeline for its armed forces, interfering in domestic politics in Bolivia and Argentina, and running the fake research platform.

The audience numbers are not what makes the case notable.

Per NBC's Kevin Collier, the operation "stoked tension between Ukraine and Poland and drew responses from politicians in several countries," and tricked schools in Latin America along the way. It lands amid a visible run of OpenAI safety disclosures this fall.