Operation “Fish Food”: Russia-origin content farm activity

This case study was originally published in OpenAI’s February 2026⁠(opens in a new window) report on disrupting malicious uses of AI.

Actor

We banned a set of ChatGPT accounts that were linked to the “Rybar” (“Рыбарь”, in Russian, “fisherman”) network on Telegram and X. At least some of the accounts likely originated in Russia. The network generated content that was posted across the internet, sometimes by “Rybar”- branded accounts, and sometimes by social media accounts that bore no declared relationship to “Rybar”. One user also asked ChatGPT to help draw up commercial plans on behalf of “Rybar” for covert interference campaigns in Africa. Based on the way the actors used ChatGPT to feed content to the “Rybar” network and beyond, we have dubbed this operation “Fish Food”.

Behavior

The main activity we detected across this network was generating content for posting on social media. Users typically prompted in Russian, but generated content in a range of languages, notably Russian, English, and Spanish. Some of this content was then posted online by “Rybar”-branded social media accounts and the main “Rybar” website. One user also generated Sora videos promoting the “Rybar” brand.

Texts generated by one of the users in this operation and posted online, all from Russian-language prompts. Left, Russian-language post on Rybar’s Telegram channel. Top right, English-language tweet branded to Rybar. Bottom right, Spanish-language text and branded Rybar infographic on Spanish-language website andaluciamorisca.org.

Six tweets whose text matches a batch of comments generated by the main ChatGPT account in this operation, and posted online by six different X accounts.

Four Telegram posts whose text matches a batch of comments generated by the main ChatGPT account in this operation, posted by four different Telegram accounts. Of note, post 2 quoted post 1, and post 4 quoted post 3, but all four posts matched texts generated by this operation.