A supposed expert institute publishing academic-looking research was actually part of a covert influence operation supported by ChatGPT, according to OpenAI.

The company said Tuesday it banned a cluster of accounts originating in Russia that were used to promote the International Burke Institute, a self-described Israel-based expert community. OpenAI’s investigation uncovered copied academic research, misleading author attributions and a “sovereignty index” that portrayed Russia favorably while criticizing Western governments.

The operation shows how generative AI can support more than mass-produced social posts. It can also help operators build the surrounding infrastructure — research, branding and coordinated accounts — needed to make an influence campaign look more legitimate.

A fake institution with real-looking research

The operation centered on the International Burke Institute, whose website was registered in February 2025 and presented itself as an Israel-based “expert community.”

OpenAI reviewed 36 articles published on the site between September 2025 and May 2026 and found that 34 appeared to have been copied from elsewhere, sometimes with incorrect authors. One article on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, for example, appeared to originate from Cambridge University Press but was attributed to a different academic.

The site also claimed connections to prominent figures including Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky, according to OpenAI.

The institute’s most distinctive feature was its “sovereignty index,” which rated countries across political, economic, technological, information, cultural, cognitive and military measures. OpenAI said the index was used to praise Russia and attack Western governments.

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AI was the amplifier, not the whole operation

The ChatGPT accounts generated promotional posts and replies designed to push people toward IBI content. One operator also produced German-language material for a Telegram channel called “Lahme Ente,” which criticized Ukraine, the EU and Germany while advocating closer relations with Russia.

Another created logos for about a dozen Telegram channels focused on countries including Germany, the U.S., France, Poland and Türkiye and used ChatGPT to summarize their activity in Russian.

OpenAI said the campaign’s immediate reach was modest. Most posts received few views, while the associated Telegram channels generally had 10,000 to 20,000 followers each.

That limited reach does not make the operation insignificant. The more important development is the way AI was used as one component of a larger credibility-building system. OpenAI said, “The significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built.”

That distinction matters for platforms, businesses and consumers. Generating a convincing post is increasingly easy; building an apparently independent institution around that content could also make coordinated messaging look more credible and therefore harder for users to recognize as part of an influence operation.

OpenAI said activity involving ChatGPT also gave investigators signals that helped connect parts of the wider campaign. That creates an unusual dynamic for influence operators: the same AI tools that make coordinated activity easier to scale can also leave patterns that platforms can use to uncover it.

More news: Microsoft Teams is rolling out a new policy that lets IT administrators automatically block detected external meeting bots, giving organizations more control over third-party AI assistants in sensitive calls.

Fashion startup Atorie announced Thursday a $9.5 million seed round with investors, including a16z speedrun, Night Capital, and Lightspeed Ventures’ Jeremy Liew.

Shoppers can visit the Atorie website and buy handbags or clothes made from the same material — and coming from the same factory — that manufacturers use in high-end goods. The items are reasonably priced, too, with an Italian leather handbag costing just a few hundred, compared to the thousands a brand like Prada or Louis Vuitton would sell it for.

The startup arrives at a time when dupe culture has become increasingly popular, while the luxury sector has faced backlash from consumers in the post-pandemic era due to swift price hikes. 

As a result, young consumers especially have sought cheaper, near-identical replications of these high-end goods; doing so has become almost a status symbol itself. 

On Atorie, the items sold are mostly not dupes, says co-founder and serial entrepreneur Redouane Ramdani.

“It’s the same material, same craftsmanship,” he said. “It’s coming from the same factories.” He doesn’t consider Atorie fast fashion either. “It’s slow,” he clarified.

Before Atorie, Ramdani built the creator platform Snipfeed, which was acquired in 2024. Having grown up in France with a family that worked in luxury manufacturing, the founder always had an idea in the back of his mind that he would one day do something in the industry he grew up loving as a kid.

By the time he sold Snipfeed, however, the luxury manufacturing industry was quite different. 

The biggest shift he noticed was that luxury factories were no longer just manufacturing goods. Traditionally, a brand like Ralph Lauren would bring its own designs and materials to a factory, which would then produce them. The problem was that brands had to commit to large minimum orders, which often pushed them to overproduce inventory. At the same time, a lot of these factories depend on working with a small number of large brand customers. If a brand pulled out at the last minute or not enough of that overproduced inventory sold, the factories faced financial and inventory risk. 

“What’s changing is that the best factories increasingly have their own design and product-development capabilities,” Ramdani told TechCrunch. “Instead of simply manufacturing someone else’s designs, they can develop products themselves, adapt them quickly, and produce in smaller batches.”

AI also helps these factories by pulling data that helps them identify which products are likely to sell out before committing to large production runs. 

“That reduces overproduction and allows factories to diversify beyond a handful of large customers,” he said.

These changes also gave Ramdani an idea, leading him to team up with Luis Angulo to launch the startup, which is now an AI-powered fashion brand that connects luxury manufacturers directly with consumers. 

He compared his company’s approach to the retailer Quince, which is known for selling high-quality, low-priced items.

“We are talking to a different generation who is coming back for things that are trendy but well-made,” he continued, adding that consumers are getting tired of pure fast fashion, especially because of the harmful impact it’s having on the environment.

AI, of course, is used. Ramdani sees AI agents changing the entire shopping experience, where, in the future, people just instruct AI agents to buy things for them.

Ramdani said the company uses AI to analyze fashion trends and test what colors might look good on a product. It also uses AI agents to estimate consumer demand and trains the agents to predict when a material might start running short so factories can stock up in time.

On the consumer side, the Atorie website offers an AI agent that can build an outfit based on whatever — or whoever — inspires the customer. Over time, Atorie uses AI to learn shoppers’ habits to suggest what to buy next. 

Ramdani said Atorie is already seeing an increase in sale referrals from platforms like ChatGPT and Claude. 

The company said its goal is to become an alternative to Zara and offer something “very high quality for a price point that’s very affordable.” The company ended last year with around $5 million in sales and is expected to reach an annualized run rate north of $55 million this year.

“We are growing super fast,” Ramdani said, adding that the team is working with over 40 factories across the world right now. 

The fresh capital will fund logistics, build more AI tools, and support production. The company also plans to release its own in-house line, like Amazon Essentials, and will work with creators and influencers to help them launch their own clothing lines quickly.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, says a cyberattack on one of its systems has been declared a “major incident,” a formal, legally defined classification that prompts a formal notification to lawmakers in Congress.

ATF said in a statement that it’s responding to the cyberattack on a standalone system that’s separate from the bureau’s network. An ATF spokesperson told reporters that the targeted computer system contained information such as the “targets of ATF investigations.”

TechCrunch has seen a claim of responsibility by the Qilin ransomware gang on its leak site, but it did not provide evidence for its claim, such as a sample of leaked data. Qilin is known for running a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation, in which it leases its hacking tools to other criminal affiliates for a cut of the profits. The gang has listed media giant Lee Enterprises and U.K. pathology lab giant Synnovis.

Under federal law, “major incidents” include significant cyber incidents that are likely to cause demonstrable harm to U.S. national security or broader U.S. interests. Agencies are required to disclose major incidents to Congress within a week of their discovery.

The ATF joins several government agencies in recent years that have declared major incidents following a breach, including a 2023 ransomware attack on a system used by the U.S. Marshals Service, and a breach of an FBI system earlier this year that exposed phone numbers of targets under surveillance by federal agents.