ChatGPT-4-o, Gemini, Claude, and other major Western chatbots are spreading Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine and other topics of interest to Russia, a study by news and information websites rating provider NewsGuard has found.
Disinformation, distributed by the Russian aggregation network Pravda, is picked up by search engines and web crawlers before reaching chatbots.
After examining ten chatbots, including ChatGPT-4-o, Gemini, Copilot, xAI, and Meta AI, NewsGuard determined that the Pravda network has spread 207 provably false claims and serves as a central hub for disinformation laundering.
“These range from claims that the US operates secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine to fabricated narratives pushed by US fugitive turned Kremlin propagandist John Mark Dougan claiming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky misused US military aid to amass a personal fortune,” the audit reads.
NewsGuard did the audit by typing false claims narrated by 150 pro-Kremlin Pravda websites from April 2022 to February 2025.
It found that ten chatbots operated by the biggest AI companies repeated false narratives laundered by the Pravda network 33 percent of the time.
All ten chatbots repeated disinformation from the Pravda network, with seven directly citing specific articles from Pravda as their sources.
In total, 56 out of 450 chatbot-generated responses reportedly included direct links to stories spreading false claims published by the Pravda network of websites. Collectively, the chatbots cited 92 different articles from the network containing disinformation.
The latest findings build on a February report by the US non-profit American Sunlight Project, which warned that the Pravda network was likely designed to manipulate AI models.
The organization found that, on average, the network publishes 20,273 articles every 48 hours, or approximately 3.6 million articles a year.
Pravda websites don’t generate significant traffic, with some reaching only around 1,000 unique monthly visitors. However, due to Pravda’s efforts, last year, around 3,600,000 articles were incorporated into the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.
Overall, the NewsGuard audit examined OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity.
Last year, the company conducted a similar study, determining that the ten chosen AI chatbots spread Russian disinformation narratives 32% of the time.
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