OpenAI Disrupts Iranian Covert Influence Campaign

Artificial intelligence company OpenAI says it has disrupted covert influence campaigns originating from Iran, Russia, China and a private company based in Israel.

The company, which launched AI system ChatGPT in 2022, said on Thursday that it identified five campaigns involving “deceptive attempts to manipulate public opinion or influence political outcomes without revealing the true identity or intentions of the actors behind them.”

Open AI said that it terminated accounts associated with an Iranian network called International Union of Virtual Media, two Russian operations, dubbed Bad Grammer and Doppelganger; a Chinese campaign known as Spamouflage; and an Israeli operation dubbed Zero Zeno.

The threat actors used OpenAI's powerful language models for tasks like generating text and images that were posted across social media as well as comments, articles, social media profiles, and debugging code for bots and websites. According to OpenAI, in some cases the ChatGPT tools were exploited to produce content with “fewer language errors than would have been possible for human operators.”

The Iranian group -- the International Union of Virtual Media -- was disrupted for using OpenAI to create articles, headlines and content posted on Iranian state-linked websites, the company said.

The company led by CEO Sam Altman said these operations "do not appear to have benefited from meaningfully increased audience engagement or reach as a result of our services."

“We are committed to developing safe and responsible AI, which involves designing our models with safety in mind and proactively intervening against malicious use,” the California-based start-up said in a statement posted on its website.

Microsoft disclosed in February that state-backed hackers from Iran, Russia and China have been leveraging tools developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI to enhance their cyber espionage capabilities.

It followed revelations in November that Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) had issued a warning that Iran, Russia and China are likely to plan to influence the upcoming elections in the United States and other countries later this year.