Iran and China have run the first truly autonomous AI influence campaigns, according to a New York Times report. The state-backed actors, joined by private firms in Israel, used AI agents built on open-source Chinese models to run social media operations with almost no human input.

Hundreds of agents were deployed to open fake accounts on Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, the report said. The bots filled those accounts with posts about politics and current events, coordinated their messaging, and in many cases disabled safety guardrails that would normally block such abuse.

The Iranian campaign targeted US audiences, the report said. Its AI-generated accounts posed as ordinary Americans in major cities, posted popular memes, tagged journalists and politicians, and promoted views critical of the Republican Party. Nearly 80,000 people followed the accounts, which were active in the first half of 2026.

US officials and researchers traced the Chinese and Iranian operations to state-backed actors, the report said. The campaigns ran at a speed and scale no human team could match, raising doubts about what voters can trust online ahead of the 2026 midterms.