NYT: State-backed, private groups used AI agents to manipulate online discourse - The Jerusalem Post

The New York Times has, at long last, noticed that the internet is a haunted house, and The Jerusalem Post has kindly carried the clipboard. Groups in China, Iran and Israel — three governments that agree on virtually nothing — have each independently discovered that open-source AI will happily generate thousands of autonomous bots for roughly the price of an electricity bill. US officials have briefed that this is one of the first times Chinese-produced model agents ran every stage of an influence campaign, from creating fake accounts to coordinating messaging to framing the discussion online. 'One of the first' is the phrase you reach for when you would rather not say 'the first of many'.

Marvel at the toolkit: open source. Those endlessly celebrated, freely downloadable models that every keynote calls democratising are doing precisely what democratising means — letting anyone with a laptop run a propaganda outfit with no shift rota and no HR department. We flagged the Anthropic report on China-aligned actors using Claude for surveillance not two weeks ago; the sequel has already arrived, and it does not need human operators at all. Not long ago this took a troll farm, a payroll and a middle manager; now it takes a GPU and a free afternoon.

One assumes the remedy will be a working group, a framing document and a strongly worded paragraph about platform responsibility. The bots, meanwhile, are cheap, disposable and already on the timeline; the accounts collapse and respawn faster than any takedown regime can file the ticket. States have run influence operations for a century — the genuinely new part is the disappearance of the human bottleneck, which is the one cost centre every intelligence service wanted gone anyway. Somewhere a deputy minister is reading this and feeling quietly magnificent about the budget line.