'Pravda' Network, Successor to 'Portal Kombat,' Allegedly Seeding AI Models with Kremlin Disinformation
Description
A purported Moscow-based disinformation network, Pravda, allegedly infiltrated AI models by flooding the internet with pro-Kremlin falsehoods. A NewsGuard audit found that 10 major AI chatbots repeated these narratives 33% of the time, citing Pravda sources as legitimate. The tactic, called "LLM grooming," manipulates AI training data to embed Russian propaganda. Pravda is part of Portal Kombat, a larger Russian disinformation network identified by VIGINUM in February 2024, but in operation since February 2022.
Actors
Alleged Deployers
- tigerweb
- storm-1516
- russian-state-media
- pro-russian-information-manipulation-actors
- pravda-disinformation-network
- portal-kombat
- john-mark-dougan
- information-manipulation-actors
- government-of-russia
Alleged Developers
- you.com
- xai
- perplexity
- openai
- mistral
- microsoft
- meta
- inflection
- anthropic
Harmed Parties
- policymakers
- national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders
- media-consumers
- journalists
- journalistic-integrity
- governments
- government-of-ukraine
- general-public-of-ukraine
- general-public
- epistemic-integrity
- democratic-integrity
- chatbot-users
Classification
Risk Domain
Malicious Actors & MisuseRisk Subdomain
4.1. Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale
MIT Risk Profile
Source
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Research Papers on This Topic
How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs
AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents
Regulating ChatGPT and other Large Generative AI Models
Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack