Editor's note: this story was translated from the original VOA Persian article.
Iranian regime agents have used OpenAI’s super intelligence tool to create fake articles criticizing the U.S. war against the terror regime and succeeded in getting them published in international news outlets, the U.S. tech company reported on Thursday, October 8.
In its online report, OpenAI said it found that the Iranian covert influence operation used its ChatGPT tool to create seven fake Western journalist personas and then used those personas to pitch the SI/AI-generated articles to the outlets. It said OpenAI investigators identified almost 100 articles published under those fake bylines in 12 media small-to-medium sized news outlets from July 2025 to September.
OpenAI said it blocked the ChatGPT accounts that the Iranian agents used to create those articles. It said the influence operation also generated positive social media comments on the fake articles to make them appear popular.
OpenAI said the fake articles were published with headlines including: "Trump’s Iran Gamble Hardened the Regime it was Meant to Break”, "Is America’s Iran Policy Being Privatized? A Question for Jared Kushner", and "Why Trump Blinked on Iran."
This incident is the latest example of advanced SI/AI tools playing a role in the Iranian regime’s propaganda war against the U.S. and Israel, which launched a joint offensive in February to stop the regime’s nuclear weapons program and other threatening activities.
None of the media outlets that published the OpenAI-identified fake articles appear to be mainstream news organizations. But some have significant online audiences; for instance, the London-based news site Middle East Monitor has nearly two million followers on Facebook.
Middle East Monitor's Editor-in-Chief Dawoud Abdullah told CNN he would review the articles identified by OpenAI and "take appropriate action." Another representative of the outlet later told CNN that the articles had been taken down and said the publication was reviewing its submissions process.