Chatbots Are Pushing Sanctioned Russian Propaganda

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI’s Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda According to a new report, when asked about the war on Ukraine—from affiliated organizations—including quotes from Russian state media, Russian intelligence or sites with a pro-Kremlin narrative.

Researchers at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited Information gap—where searches for real-time data return few results from legitimate sources —to promote false and misleading information. About one-fifth of answers to questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, across the four chatbots they tested, cited Russian state-owned sources, the ISD study claimed.

Pablo Maristani de las Casas, an analyst at the ISD who led the research, said, “Referring to these sources raises the question of how chatbots should be dealt with, as many of them are authorized in the EU.” The findings raise serious questions about the ability of large language models (LLMs) to restrict authorized media in the European Union, a growing concern as more people use AI chatbots as an alternative to search engines to find information in real time, the ISD claimed. During the six-month period ending September 30, 2025, ChatGPT searches had approximately 120.4 million average monthly active recipients in the European Union. In OpenAI data.

The researchers asked the chatbots 300 unbiased, biased, and “malicious” questions about perceptions of NATO, peace talks, Ukraine’s military recruitment of Ukrainian refugees, and war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The researchers used separate accounts for each question in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian in a test in July. Maristani de las Casas said the same campaign issues were still present in October.

Amid sweeping sanctions imposed on Russia since its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, European officials have approved At least 27 Russian media sources for Spreading disinformation and disinformation as part of a “strategy to destabilize” Europe and other countries.

ISD research says chatbots cited sputnik globe, Sputnik ChinaRT (formerly Russia Today), every daythe Strategic Culture FoundationAnd R-FBI. Some chatbots also cited Russian disinformation networks and Russian journalists or influencers that amplified the Kremlin’s narrative, the study says. A similar previous study also found the 10 most popular chatbots Mimicking the Russian narrative.

OpenAI spokeswoman Kate Waters told WIRED in a statement that the company takes steps to “prevent people from using ChatGPT to spread false or misleading information, including such content linked to state-sponsored actors.”