OpenAI Cuts Off Russian Accounts Using ChatGPT to Fake Political Voices Online

Key points

• OpenAI on Tuesday banned a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts running an influence operation, meaning a coordinated campaign to sway public opinion with fake voices.
• The accounts used VPNs (virtual private networks, tools that hide a user's real location) to get around OpenAI's regional access rules.
• The chatbot was used to write social media posts and comments pushed onto Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn.
• The content promoted a front group calling itself the International Burke Institute (IBI).
• OpenAI disclosed the takedown in its latest threat report, which tracks abuse of its tools.

OpenAI has pulled the plug on a batch of Russian-run ChatGPT accounts that were quietly using the chatbot as a propaganda factory. The company announced the ban on Tuesday.

The accounts were tied to an influence operation, a coordinated effort to shape political conversation online by pretending to be ordinary users. Instead of writing posts by hand, the operators fed prompts into ChatGPT and let the AI produce the words.

Those AI-written posts and comments then landed on Substack, Telegram, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and LinkedIn.

Who was behind the accounts?

OpenAI attributes the activity to a Russia-linked network. To reach ChatGPT in the first place, the operators leaned on VPNs, software that reroutes internet traffic through another country to disguise where a user really is. OpenAI restricts access to its services from certain regions, including Russia, and the VPNs were the workaround.

The report, first surfaced by The Hacker News, describes the cluster as one of several state-aligned abuse cases OpenAI has caught this year.

What were they actually posting?

The content pushed a group calling itself the International Burke Institute, or IBI. On paper it looks like a policy think tank. In practice, according to OpenAI, it functioned as a front: a respectable-sounding label to wrap political messaging in, so posts and articles looked like commentary from a real research body rather than a Kremlin-aligned campaign.

Operators used ChatGPT to draft the material at speed. That is the appeal of generative AI for this kind of work. One person can produce the writing output of a small newsroom, in several languages, without hiring anyone.

How did OpenAI spot it?

OpenAI runs its own internal threat-intelligence team that looks for patterns of misuse across accounts: shared prompts, shared writing styles, shared infrastructure, odd log-in behaviour. Once a cluster is confirmed, the accounts are terminated and the findings are written up in a public threat report.

The company has been publishing these reports roughly every few months since 2024. Earlier editions named operations linked to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Should ordinary social media users care?

Yes, but not in a panicked way. The practical takeaway is simple: a share-worthy political post from an account you have never heard of, citing a think tank you have never heard of, deserves a second look before you repost it.

A few habits help:

• Check whether the "institute" or "foundation" behind a viral claim has a real staff page, real funding disclosure and real prior work.
• Be wary of accounts that post at inhuman volume or in fluent but oddly generic prose.
• Cross-check any explosive claim against at least one established news outlet before sharing.

None of that is new advice. AI-generated propaganda just makes it cheaper to produce, so the volume goes up.

What OpenAI has not said

The company did not publish the exact number of banned accounts in the excerpt reviewed, nor the reach of the posts (follower counts, engagement figures). It also did not name individuals behind the IBI branding. Attribution in influence operations is difficult, and vendors tend to stop short of naming people without hard evidence.

Expect more of these takedowns. The economics of AI-assisted propaganda favour the attacker, and the platforms know it.