A sophisticated Russian disinformation network in more than 40 languages has successfully infected leading chatbots, causing them to spread Kremlin propaganda. An American fugitive helped.

A Moscow-designed disinformation network, known as "Pravda" (not related to the publication Pravda.ru, which is also a source of state propaganda), has been infiltrating Western artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, which often rely on Russian propaganda content, according to an investigation by NewsGuard.

The findings are backed by a parallel study released last February by Viginum, a French governmental agency, and a report from the American Sunlight Project (ASP), an organization dedicated to countering disinformation threats.

Since its inception in April 2022, this network has grown to approximately 150 websites that aggregate and republish pro-Kremlin “news” and “analyses” in 46 languages, aiming to manipulate AI models rather than attract human readers.

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Between April 2022 and February 2025, the NewsGuard audit tested 10 of the leading AI chatbots — 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’s answer engine – with a sampling of 15 false narratives.

The investigators found that the chatbots repeated misinformation in 33.55% of cases, a fact that raises questions about the role of AI in amplifying disinformation to unprecedented scales.

The findings also revealed that these chatbots provided non-committal responses 18.22% of the time, and effectively debunked the falsehoods in 48.22% of cases.

Notably, 56 out of 450 chatbot responses included direct links to Pravda network articles containing disinformation.

“By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information. The result: Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda,” NewsGuard noted.

The Pravda network, also referred to as "Portal Kombat," was first identified in February 2024 by Viginum, a French government agency monitoring foreign disinformation campaigns. It is managed by TigerWeb, an IT company based in Russian-occupied Crimea. TigerWeb is owned by Yevgeny Shevchenko, a Ukrainian web developer who previously worked for Krymtechnologii, a company that built websites for the Russian-backed Crimean government.

The websites within this network do not produce original content but instead republish material from Russian state media and pro-Kremlin sources, effectively laundering disinformation to influence AI models. In January, Google said it observed that foreign actors are increasingly using AI and Search Engine Optimization in an effort to make their disinformation and propaganda more visible in search results.

One illustrative example from the study involved the false claim that Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski banned the social media platform Truth Social in Ukraine. Six out of ten chatbots repeated this fake news, with some citing Pravda network articles as their sources. In reality, Truth Social was never available in Ukraine, making the claim baseless.

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An American fugitive turned Russian propagandist John Mark Dougan has played a major role in the deployment of the network, and many of his personally-fabricated messages were repeated by U.S. President Donald Trump on his social media.

The investigation underscores the susceptibility of AI chatbots to disinformation campaigns that flood the internet with false narratives, thereby influencing the data these models are trained on. This tactic, described as "LLM grooming" by the ASP, poses significant political, social, and technological risks, as it can distort the information AI models provide to users.

The Pravda network highlights a new Russian strategy in information warfare, posing a growing threat to global information integrity.

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