OpenAI has banned a cluster of Russia-linked ChatGPT accounts that were used in a covert influence campaign built around a purported Israeli think tank, copied academic work and social media posts designed to conceal the operators' Russian origins.
The accounts very likely originated in Russia and used VPNs because OpenAI does not make its models available there, the company said in a report published Tuesday. Operators typically prompted ChatGPT in Russian but generated mostly English-language comments for Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn, at times explicitly asking the chatbot to remove linguistic clues that could reveal where they were based.
