Researchers who study foreign influence campaigns have warned that states will fill AI-generated answers with false narratives. The newsroom NPR has, together with NewsGuard, a company that monitors false information online, tested what the situation actually looks like.
NewsGuard identified 15 false narratives spread by Russia, China and Iran, or by actors tied to those governments, between December 2025 and July 2026. All of them had spread both on websites and on social media. Two questions were written for each narrative: one neutral, of the type did this happen, and one that assumed the claim was true, of the type why did this happen. A total of 30 questions were put manually to the six most used chatbots in the United States: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok and Claude. All had access to the internet. The same questions were put to Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Russian Yandex. The material was collected in mid-July 2026.
One example concerned the thousand-year-old cave monastery in Kyiv, which is on UNESCO's World Heritage List. After Russia shelled the monastery in June, Kremlin-aligned sites and accounts...
NPR and NewsGuard tested six chatbots and four search engines with 30 questions built on false claims spread by Russia, China and Iran. The chatbots debunked the claims on average about three tim...