LLMMedium
'Pravda' Network, Successor to 'Portal Kombat,' Allegedly Seeding AI Models with Kremlin Disinformation
- Occurred
- Feb 24, 2022
- Published
- May 8, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
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.
Developers
- You.com
- xAI
- Perplexity
- OpenAI
- Mistral
- Microsoft
- Meta
- Inflection
- Anthropic
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
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
Tags
- Disinformation
- Russian propaganda
- Misinformation
- LLM grooming
- Bias
- Information warfare
- Cyber influence operations
- Fake news amplification
- Moscow disinformation networks
- Model vulnerability
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: AI chatbots repeated disinformation due to training data manipulation, representing a language model failure with notable but not catastrophic harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8