Russian propaganda may be influencing some answers from artificial intelligence chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s MetaAI, according to a new report. NewsGuard, a company that develops rating systems for news and information websites, claims to have discovered evidence that a Moscow-based network called Pravda was publishing false claims to influence the responses of artificial intelligence models.

NewsGuard quoted statistics from the non-profit organization American Sunshine Project as saying that "Pravda" is full of pro-Russian false information in search results and web crawlers, publishing 3.6 million misleading articles in 2024 alone.The analysis looked at 10 major chatbots and found that 33% of the time the chatbots collectively repeated Russian disinformation narratives, such as the fact that the United States had a secret bioweapons laboratory in Ukraine.Pravda Network’s ability to effectively penetrate the output of its AI chatbot is largely due to its technology of increasing the visibility of its content through search engine optimization strategies. For chatbots that rely heavily on web engines, this can be a difficult problem to solve.