A February 2026 safety report by the company behind ChatGPT details an operation dubbed “Fish Food,” in which a set of ChatGPT accounts tied to the Rybar network generated large volumes of content for posting across social platforms. The report states some accounts likely originated in Russia and were subsequently banned.
Operation and tactics
The report describes how users prompted models in Russian to produce content in Russian, English and Spanish. Outputs included social posts, batches of English-language comments, branded material and Sora videos promoting the Rybar name. Some generated texts appeared on Rybar-branded channels and on accounts with no declared link to Rybar.
Investigators matched exact language from model outputs to posts on X and Telegram and identified instances where a single prompt produced multiple tweets that were posted by different accounts. One seven-tweet batch produced posts whose views ranged from 57 to more than 150,000; the highest-viewed tweet was posted by an account with over 600,000 followers and the lowest-viewed by an account with 827 followers (both follower counts dated 26 January 2026).
Proposed campaigns and scope
The report says the same actor asked the model to translate service lists and edit proposals that sketched covert interference activities in Africa, including building local agent networks, organizing events and running bilingual outlets. Specific countries mentioned included the DRC, Burundi, Cameroon and Madagascar. For the most ambitious proposals, the document cites an estimated annual budget of up to $600,000.
Promotional material for a news outlet called REST Media, which open-source researchers have linked to Rybar, was also generated and posted by related channels. The report characterizes the content as consistent with covert Russian influence operations, noting it typically praised Russia and allies, criticized Ukraine and accused Western countries of interference.
The document assigns the activity to the top end of Category 3 on the IO impact Breakout Scale (multiple communities on multiple platforms). It records that Rybar’s main Russian-language Telegram channel had about 1.4 million subscribers and that many associated X and Telegram accounts held tens of thousands of followers, while finding no evidence of amplification by mainstream news outlets or confirmed on-the-ground activity in Africa matching the sales pitches.
Original source: OpenAI News