Microsoft says artificial intelligence is now central to state-backed disinformation, marking a new phase in digital warfare where propaganda is cheap, fast and nearly impossible to trace.
In its Digital Defense Report 2025, Microsoft identifies China, Russia, and Iran as the leading nation-state actors exploiting AI to produce and distribute synthetic content at scale.
The company’s analysts say the technology has transformed online influence operations from sporadic experiments into sustained campaigns targeting governments, voters and institutions worldwide.
The company’s analysts say the technology has transformed online influence operations from sporadic experiments into sustained campaigns.
The report shows that AI-generated propaganda has grown exponentially since early 2024, with the number of identified state-linked samples surpassing 200 by mid-2025. It also maps the highest-priority targets: Israel, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, alongside Ukraine, which remains the primary focus of Russian operations.
“Nation-state actors continue to evolve their cyber and influence operations with the rapid adoption of AI, employing more advanced, targeted, and scalable tactics… In the last six months, AI in influence operations has picked up aggressively.”
The company describes a new generation of AI-first actors, or state-aligned entities that rely more on synthetic media than on human-crafted content.
Among the tactics identified are AI twinning, which creates digital replicas of trusted news anchors; voice cloning and masking, used to impersonate officials and public figures; and training-data poisoning, where adversaries inject false or biased information into datasets to corrupt AI model outputs.
“These actors are shifting from spectacle to saturation, flooding the information space with synthetic media to desensitize audiences and exhaust detection systems.”
Microsoft also warns that the convergence of AI and cyber operations has made influence campaigns “persistent, low-cost, and scalable.”
“The objectives remain consistent: to manipulate public perception and shape conflict narratives. The integration of AI tools with conventional cyber techniques—such as phishing, credential harvesting, and insider recruitment—has made these operations easier to scale, more effective, and harder to trace. Attribution will become increasingly challenging as AI blurs the line between state-linked and opportunistic influence campaigns.”
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