The Kremlin-funded Pravda network is influencing advanced artificial intelligence chatbots to spread Russian propaganda. NewsGuard, a developer of rating systems for news sites, reported on this in its new study.
The company's research showed that the top ten AI models spread the Kremlin's propaganda narratives 33.5% of the time. They are:
- 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.
- Perplexity's response engine.
They even claimed as fact those fakes that have been debunked on the Internet. For example, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky allegedly banned US President Donald Trump's Truth Social app in retaliation for criticism on the platform.
Or that Azov fighters burned an effigy of Trump because of his attempts to "stop the conflict in Ukraine" (this was a staged video by the Russian Storm-1516 campaign), or that the United States allegedly runs secret biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.
What is the Pravda Network and how does it work?
The Pravda network, also known as Portal Kombat, emerged in April 2022 after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. It was first identified in February 2024 by Viginum, a French government agency that monitors foreign disinformation campaigns.
Since then, the network has expanded significantly, covering 49 countries, using dozens of languages, and operating through 150 domains. In 2024, according to NewsGuard and other research organizations, the network is literally flooding the Internet with fake news - this year alone, it published 3.6 million articles, according to the American think tank Sunlight Project. Moreover, they publish material not for the sake of reporting, but only to influence AI models.
