State-backed actors from Iran and China, along with private firms in Israel, have recently deployed autonomous artificial intelligence agents to run unprecedented influence campaigns across social media, the New York Times reported. These efforts mark a significant shift in how online manipulation occurs, moving away from human-led operations to automated systems that handle every stage of the process.
By leveraging powerful open-source Chinese models, these groups have created bots capable of opening fake accounts, coordinating messaging, and seeding content without needing much human intervention. This new wave of activity has caught the attention of U.S. intelligence and major tech companies.
