Overview
- Democratic intelligence leaders told reporters on Wednesday that a classified briefing from the Director of National Intelligence says Russia is running an online misinformation campaign that uses AI to target Democratic candidates.
- Lawmakers singled out Senator Jon Ossoff and Texas Democrat James Talarico as specific targets of fake ads and AI-generated videos that surfaced after early voting began.
- Independent disinformation researchers reported on Oct. 22 that some recent AI-generated attack videos were likely produced by Russian government-backed actors.
- Officials said there is no current evidence that any foreign actor can penetrate U.S. vote-counting systems to change results, but they warned the influence campaign could be used to cast doubt on outcomes.
- Democrats have asked intelligence chiefs to be immediately reachable on Election Day and cautioned that cuts to federal election-security capacity, including at CISA, will make it harder to detect and counter such campaigns, a pattern that echoes Russian operations tracked in prior election cycles.