OpenAI disclosed on 8 October that it shut down two influence operations — one Russian, one Iranian — that used ChatGPT and other AI tools to manufacture fake journalist personas and covert think tanks and succeeded in planting narratives in mainstream outlets. The Russian cluster, which OpenAI calls "Dark Clark," centred on a fictitious Latin American think tank, the Social Research Center, fronted by an AI-generated persona named Mia Clark; its content targeted Ukraine's reputation in Latin America and engaged Argentine and Bolivian politics, and internal ChatGPT records discussing wage scales and hiring suggest the Russian operators controlled the organisation rather than merely observing it. OpenAI called it "the most complex attempt to run a front identity that we've disrupted over the past two and a half years," and said the Latin American staff appear not to have known who they worked for. The disclosure sits alongside a widening set of AI-vendor misuse reports and reinforces that generative tooling now shortens the cost of building and staffing a plausible media front — a capability previously bounded by who could be recruited and paid.

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