OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts posing as a fake Israeli think tank — used VPNs to push pro-Kremlin narratives and steal academic papers for its website | Tom's Hardware
OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts posing as a fake Israeli think tank — used VPNs to push pro-Kremlin narratives and steal academic papers for its website | Tom's Hardware
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OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts posing as a fake Israeli think tank — used VPNs to push pro-Kremlin narratives and steal academic papers for its website
Luke James
Published
26 August 2026
The operation reached almost no one.
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A fake Israeli think tank credited migration-policy research to an Australian professor of food science, ran a "sovereignty index" that scored Russia above the countries criticizing its war, and filled its site with academic papers lifted from their real authors. OpenAI banned the cluster of ChatGPT accounts behind it on August 25,
tracing the operation back to Russia
, where operators used VPNs to reach models blocked in the country and drafted mostly English-language posts promoting the outlet across Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Of 36 articles OpenAI sampled from the International Burke Institute, as the outlet called itself, 34 were copied from real academics, some misattributed to figures including Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky.
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