The BaseVideoNBC News6 min6,606 views

Researchers find AI chatbots cited spoofed campaign websites ahead of midterms

NBC News reports on a study by Caucus AI, an independent research project, in which fake campaign websites made by the researchers were cited by chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini. NBC's Jared Perlo describes the experiment, Google's response and the chatbots' wrong voting information.

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Why it matters

The same thing, for different readers.

What it means for you

Chatbots can repeat information from websites anyone can put up, so voting answers from ChatGPT or Gemini should be checked against official sources.

For lawmakers

Caucus AI's test suggests election officials and regulators cannot assume AI companies filter out fake candidate sites, which a hostile state could also make.

For researchers

Caucus AI's seeding experiment shows how quickly new web pages can enter chatbot answers, within 19 hours by NBC's account.

How the finding was reached

In our words, from the source. Weigh the finding by how it was made.

What was done
Caucus AI created 52 unofficial websites about 26 real Senate candidates, containing the candidates' real information, then watched whether chatbots cited them, as described by NBC's reporter.
What it found
NBC's reporter says chatbots started citing the sites within 19 hours and that by the end of October 92% of them had been cited; chatbots also frequently gave wrong voting information, one giving the wrong election day.
What it does not show
Reported on air, not from the report itself; Google said the study tests fabricated locations and candidates, not real elections, and is not reflective of real use.
Status
A report

The record

Questions
How is AI changing childhood, health and daily life? · Who can demand evidence, delay a release or stop an unsafe deployment?
People
Jared Perlo (Speaks, AI reporter, NBC News)
What we read
We read the whole source.
Found by
The Radar, run of November 6, 2026, via yt-nbc-news (tier 1: the source’s own channel or an official record)
Cite this
NBC News, “Researchers find AI chatbots cited spoofed campaign websites ahead of midterms”, November 5, 2026. Entry in the Ctrl AI Base, https://ctrlai.com/base/nbc-news-2026-11-05-chatbots-cited-spoofed-campaign-sites
Our notesCaptions are live broadcast captions with doubled, garbled lines, so two candidate quotations failed the checker and were dropped (I had rewritten the .txt with the doubled lines merged, but the checker did not accept it; the .txt is therefore a de-duplicated copy of the caption words, and .transcript.json is the original). Speakers are unlabelled, so the reporter is identified from the introduction. The Caucus AI report itself was not read; the date NBC gives for taking sites offline (October 29) and the 92% figure are NBC's reporter's words. Check against the report.