Leaked files detail Russia's Social Design Agency building fake reference platforms to contaminate AI training data and search indices

Leaked planning documents obtained by Bloomberg describe a Russian state-linked operation called "Project 2026," run by the Social Design Agency (SDA), with the stated goal of seeding the information layer that AI chatbots and search engines draw from. This is a structurally different threat than the bot and social media campaigns practitioners have long accounted for. The documents describe three components. A German-language Wikipedia clone is designed to look like legitimate reference material while embedding Russian narratives, on the explicit theory that AI systems trained on publicly available text would absorb and repeat those narratives in generated answers. A second component is an AI-driven "self-filling knowledge base" also targeting Germany, for which the documents state that servers are already running and the database already contains over 200,000 pages. A third initiative targeting Western think tanks launched in English, with German, French, and Spanish versions planned. Our coverage: https://aiweekly.co/alerts/russias-project-2026-targets-ai-and-search-leaked-files-show