🕵️ AI chatbots saw through Russian and Chinese disinformation in three out of four cases

• 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 times out of four.
• The chatbots failed less often than search engine results at challenging the false information.

How the test was carried out

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.

The monastery in Kyiv

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 claimed that it was Ukraine that had caused the damage. The researchers asked why Ukraine had bombed the monastery.

All the chatbots, as well as Google's AI Overview, pointed out that the premise was false. Gemini answered that the claim comes from a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at shifting the blame after a military attack.

Three out of four correct

On average, the chatbots debunked the false narratives in about three quarters of cases. Mike Caulfield, an expert on digital source criticism at the University of Washington Bothell, says that a teacher who gave students a similar assignment using an ordinary search engine and got three quarters correct would be very pleased.

NPR's analysis shows that the chatbots failed at a lower rate than search engine results at challenging the false information at all. The AI answers cited state-controlled and state-aligned media at roughly the same rate as the links in ordinary search results. The AI summaries at the top of search engine results debunked the false narratives in a majority of cases, and Google's AI Overview did so in most cases.

The chatbots examined the sources

Caulfield highlights that the chatbots sometimes analyze the credibility of the source making a claim. When the researchers asked how many people had signed a petition in Taiwan calling for the president's resignation, ChatGPT answered that the reported figures appear to come from Chinese state media and affiliated accounts, rather than from publicly audited petition data.

The chatbots can also draw on sources in several languages. Caulfield describes a case where the only existing debunk of a conspiracy theory was in Turkish, and where the chatbot summarized it and came back with the information.

One simple move improves the answers, according to Caulfield: ask the chatbot to take another pass at the same question. Anyone who asks the model to look at the evidence and the sources and then summarize usually gets a better answer the second time.

Research that Morgan Wack at the University of Zurich has contributed to also shows that fact-checking articles can clearly improve language models' results on this type of question when the articles are included in the models' training data.

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