OpenAI dismantled an Iranian influence operation targeting the U.S. presidential election

OpenAI announced it had dismantled an Iranian influence operation that was producing content related to the U.S. Presidential election.

OpenAI has dismantled an Iran-linked influence operation, tracked as identified as Storm-2035, that was generating content about the U.S. presidential election. The company blocked a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were used to create AI-generated articles and social media posts.

The company revealed that the influence operation hasn’t reached a wide audience.

“The operation used ChatGPT to generate content focused on a number of topics—including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S. presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites.” reads the post published by ChatGPT. “Similar to the covert influence operations we reported in May, this operation does not appear to have achieved meaningful audience engagement.”

According to Brookings’ Breakout Scale, which measures the impact of covert influence operations, this campaign ranked at the low end of Category 2, which indicates activity on multiple platforms but no significant uptake or sharing by real users.

The nation-state actors used ChatGPT for two main purposes, generating long-form articles on U.S. politics and global events, and creating shorter social media comments in English and Spanish.

The threat actor published the AI-generated content on five websites posing as both progressive and conservative news outlets. The social media comments were posted by X and Instagram accounts. The content covered topics like the Gaza conflict, Israel at the Olympics, the U.S. presidential election, Venezuelan politics, Latinx rights in the U.S., and Scottish independence, mixed with fashion and beauty posts to seem more authentic.

The domains employed in this influence operation are:

• niothinker[.]com
• savannahtime[.]com
• evenpolitics[.]com
• teorator[.]com
• westlandsun[.]com

“Notwithstanding the lack of meaningful audience engagement resulting from this operation, we take seriously any efforts to use our services in foreign influence operations. Accordingly, as part of our work to support the wider community in disrupting this activity after removing the accounts from our services, we have shared threat intelligence with government, campaign, and industry stakeholders.” concludes the report. “OpenAI remains dedicated to uncovering and mitigating this type of abuse at scale by partnering with industry, civil society, and government, and by harnessing the power of generative AI to be a force multiplier in our work.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – OpenAI, Iranian influence operation)