Opinion|A.I. Is Lying to You. Here’s How to Fight Back.

For months, a foreign agent has been cultivating some of the most powerful figures in the United States in hopes of turning them into unwitting allies. Targeting their weak spots, the foreign agent is feeding them hour after hour of falsehoods. Already the would-be proxies are passing on the foreign propaganda to tens of millions of their followers.

If this sounds like a chapter from another century — think K.G.B. officers swaying unsuspecting fellow travelers in London or New York — it’s actually worse. The spy runner is a Russia-backed network called Portal Kombat that operates hundreds of websites to spread disinformation. The powerful figures it’s seeking to influence? Artificial intelligence-driven large language models such as ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini.

Portal Kombat’s goal is to influence these models so that they will pass along propaganda to trusting users in response to questions. Portal Kombat pushed over 3.6 million stories across hundreds of independent websites in dozens of languages in 2024, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks online disinformation. NewsGuard researchers systematically tested A.I. chat systems and found that Portal Kombat propaganda was regularly provided to users.

Large language model influence operations are just one way that America’s adversaries are using A.I. to try to steer its politics. China directs its A.I. platforms to push false claims about the treatment of Uyghurs and to censor dissent and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. Russia is using A.I. to generate scores of news websites to turn Americans against democracy and Western alliances. Like many, these adversaries use A.I. to create fake written, audio or video content that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.

The greatest danger, though, isn’t A.I.’s ability to lie. It’s the ability to persuade. These new agents of influence are less like a traditional propaganda pamphlet — static and lifeless — and more like a living, breathing case officer, as I used to be. A.I. agents try to manipulate us through sustained engagement. And unlike the K.G.B.’s espionage machinations during the Cold War, which focused on recruiting powerful individuals, today’s A.I. influence operators are trying to persuade all of us.

To fight back, Americans need to learn the counterspy techniques of C.I.A. officers: using multiple sources to check information; testing those sources regularly for reliability; never getting complacent and trusting one source without thinking.