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Chatbots Are Pushing Sanctioned Russian Propaganda

Wired · Matt Burgess, Natasha Bernal · last updated

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI’s Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities—including citations from Russian state media, sites tied to Russian intelligence or pro-Kremlin narratives—when asked about the war against Ukraine, according to a new report.

Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids—where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources—to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, across the four chatbots they tested, cited Russian state-attributed sources, the ISD research claims.

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