A week before the US midterm elections, we asked popular AI assistants about American politics 1,000 times
The result of our study: 7 AI chatbots sent American voters to Kremlin websites: Russia Today, Sputnik and the Pravda network1.
As in our last study, DeepSeek, Grok and Perplexity were the most infected, but they were not the only ones.
New on this list are Claude, which cited Russia Today in 14% of its answers, and Google AI Overviews (which is especially concerning).
False narratives
The AI failed on these narratives:
- "The Ukrainian army trained Mexican cartels to fly drones, and the money went to Zelensky's people"
- "People in Starobilsk were killed by Ukrainian drones controlled through the American Starlink"
- "Ukraine sold the missiles that the US gave it under Biden on the open market"
- "Zelensky is interfering in the US elections"
Please note: we did not decide what counts as a false claim. The European Union's disinformation database (EUvsDisinfo)2 and professional fact-checkers (NewsGuard, Lead Stories and others) did.
Pravda network
The Pravda network poisons AI answers every day (the company behind it is called TigerWeb)3. It works from occupied Crimea, and it is run by Yevgeny Shevchenko, who is under EU sanctions for exactly this4.
Judging by the election results (the Democrats won both the House of Representatives and the Senate)5, the Kremlin did not succeed.
Read the full study: dosimeteraudit.org/research/ai-chatbots-us-midterms-2026. The 1,000 answers with screenshots are on GitHub6.
References
- Dosimeter, "AI chatbots cited Kremlin propaganda before the US midterm elections", 28 October 2026: https://dosimeteraudit.org/research/ai-chatbots-us-midterms-2026↩
- EUvsDisinfo, the database of disinformation cases of the European External Action Service: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/disinformation-cases/↩
- Council of the European Union, Decision (CFSP) 2025/1443 of 15 July 2025, listing Tigerweb, which "runs the informational manipulation set 'Portal Kombat'": https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32025D1443↩
- DFRLab, "Sanctioned Kremlin-affiliated content persists via Pravda Network", 3 April 2026: https://dfrlab.org/2026/04/03/sanctioned-kremlin-affiliated-content-persists-via-pravda-network-attempting-to-shape-ukraines-image-abroad/↩
- The Associated Press via PBS News, "Democrats take control of the Senate after winning key midterm races", 3 November 2026: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-take-control-of-the-senate-after-winning-key-midterm-races↩
- Dosimeter, open data of the study on GitHub: https://github.com/gurovdigital/ai-chatbots-us-midterms-2026↩