OpenAI announced on Friday that it had caught an “Iranian influence operation” using ChatGPT. According to OpenAI, the group, known as Storm-1679, created articles and social media comments to shape public opinion about Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. In addition to targeting 2024 U.S. presidential candidates, OpenAI said Storm-1679 also created content about Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its participation in the 2024 Olympics, the rights of the Latino community in the U.S., Venezuelan politics, and Scottish independence from the United Kingdom.
OpenAI said most of the posts and articles it found were barely featured by real people. Still, the company detailed the incident in a blog post, writing that it found 12 X (formerly Twitter) accounts that posed as conservative or progressive and used hashtags like “#DumpTrump” and “#DumpKamala.” OpenAI said Storm-1679 also used at least one Instagram account to spread the AI-generated content.
OpenAI has previously described “nation-state-affiliated threat actors” using its tools, but this is the first time it has revealed a specific election interference campaign using ChatGPT.
Following its discovery, OpenAI said it banned “a group” of accounts that created the content. The company also said it “shared threat information with government, campaign, and industry stakeholders.” The company did not specifically name the stakeholders, but shared several screenshots of the posts, which had between 8 and 207 views and very few likes.
OpenAI said Storm-1679 shared ChatGPT-generated articles on multiple websites “posing as both progressive and conservative news outlets.” The company added that “the majority of the social media posts we identified received few to no likes, shares, or comments. Similarly, we found no indication that the web articles were being shared on social media.”
An August 6 report from Microsoft similarly described Storm-2035 as an Iranian network with “four websites posing as news media.” Microsoft said the network produced “polarizing” posts about the election, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza.
Reports of foreign online interference in U.S. elections are now virtually commonplace. Microsoft’s August 6 report, for example, also detailed an Iran-linked phishing attack targeting unnamed “high-ranking” U.S. campaign associates. Shortly after Microsoft retracted the report, the Trump campaign announced that “foreign sources” had stolen some of the campaign’s emails and documents in an attempt to influence the 2024 presidential election. Eight years earlier, Russia-linked hacker group Guccifer 2.0 had used a similar phishing attack to steal Democratic National Committee emails, ultimately leaking thousands of DNC emails and documents ahead of the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
Under intense pressure from lawmakers, big tech companies have responded to these incidents with a variety of efforts over the years, including fact-checking memes, wishful thinking, temporary political advertising bans, “war huddles,” and collaboration with rival companies and police.
