Russian Pranksters Dupe OpenAI Officials Into Video Chat About ‘Offensive’ AI For Ukraine

National security officials at one of the world’s top artificial intelligence labs discussed “offensive” military uses of their technology for Ukraine in a prank call.

Three senior OpenAI officials, including national security policy head Sasha Baker, strategic initiatives lead Caroline Zier and European national security lead Ben Crampton, participated in a 17-minute video call with two famous Russian pranksters impersonating Ukraine’s foreign intelligence chief Rustem Umerov, according to Vovan and Lexus’ video “Prank with AI Management” posted Wednesday on Rumble. The impersonators, Vladimir Kuznetsov (Vovan) and Alexei Stolyarov (Lexus), convinced the officials to discuss the company’s interest in contributing to the Ukraine conflict.

Baker told the pranksters that the company had a “very new” arrangement with the Department of War (DOW), according to the video call.

Vovan and Lexus asked the officials if they would give Ukraine access to AI models to support its military efforts, according to the call.

“There’s no question, I think, from our perspective that we want to have as deep a relationship as we possibly can with Ukraine,” Crampton told the pranksters. “But we have to go through a process … to get there.”

“There’s a general reluctance on the part of many people who are senior in the company to get too involved in offensive uses of our technology in a military context,” Crampton explained to the pranksters. “Part of our job is to explain that offense and defense are not necessarily distinguishable from each other under certain circumstances and that we have to think about how we can help countries in defense.”

OpenAI announced a $200 million contract with the DOW in June 2025. The contract “will … identify and prototype how frontier AI can transform its administrative operations,” the company said in the announcement.

The success of the project, called “Frontier AI Model Prototype,” will be judged by whether “warfighters, commanders” and others confirm “the capability would improve military advantage, military utility, or enhance military decision making,” according to a Feb. 27 amendment to the contract, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The overwhelming majority of the government and our researchers strongly support Ukraine,” Baker told the prankster duo during the call.

‘Prank Journalists’

Vovan and Lexus said the call took weeks to coordinate.

To get in contact with OpenAI, the duo impersonated Umerov and reached out to a Ukrainian official in San Francisco who was in contact with Baker.

Baker served as deputy under secretary of defense for policy from Feb. 2022 through April 2024, according to the DOW’s official biography and a statement from then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. She has kept up her connections with Ukrainian officials following her departure from the DOW, Vovan and Lexus told the DCNF.

The Ukrainian individual then set up their meeting with the AI company to “help lobby for Ukraine to gain access not only to standard civilian technologies, but also to frontier AI models and AI technologies intended for military use,” Vovan and Lexus told the DCNF.

To prepare for the call, the Ukrainian official sent the duo a briefing document, written in Ukrainian, that outlined concerns that China could restrict the country’s access to its open-weight models, the pair said.

Vovan and Lexus also asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT for advice on what questions they should pose to the company’s officials prior to the video call, and the chatbot said it would be interesting to see what the officials would tell them privately, the duo told the DCNF.

“We call ourselves ‘prank journalists,'” the pair told the DCNF. “We see our work as a form of investigative journalism conducted through pranks.”

“Our goal is not only to entertain people, but also to uncover information that would otherwise remain behind closed doors,” Vovan and Lexus told the DCNF. “In this particular case, we wanted to understand just how far cooperation between AI companies and governments can go, and how quickly civilian partnerships can evolve into military ones.”

The pair believes the public has a right to know how AI is being used in military efforts, they told the DCNF. Vovan and Lexus noted that OpenAI employees have “differing views” about how AI should be used for offensive capabilities and that “some people inside the company recognize the dangers of crossing that line.”

‘Kremlin Mouthpieces’

The AI lab said it investigated the call and took steps to prevent future incidents.

“Weeks ago, we launched a thorough investigation into the call’s authenticity,” OpenAI spokesperson Nate Evans said, The Intercept reported. “We acted internally and with the relevant authorities to conclude that it was a prank conducted by individuals with a history of targeting officials and other companies.”

OpenAI referred the DCNF to a Sept. 23 announcement that it was giving Ukraine access to tools to protect against cyberattacks.

The AI company declined to comment on the record when contacted by the DCNF.

The Embassy of Ukraine in Washington and the DOW did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

Vovan and Lexus deny claims that they work for Russia, and said they have faced allegations since their pranks became popular in 2014.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense describes Kuznetsov and Stolyarov as “Kremlin Mouthpieces,” according to Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence (GUR) agency.

“ore than a decade later, no one has managed to produce any credible evidence to support these claims,” the duo told the DCNF. “Apparently, repeating the same allegations year after year is much easier than actually proving them.”

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