Sam Altman’s grand vision of democratizing artificial intelligence seems, per a new study, to include an ugly asterisk: it’s monetized, at least in part, by spambots filling the web with AI-generated garbage.

According to the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, search engine optimization (SEO) scammers operated undetected for months using what company’s experts are calling “AkiraBot,” a “modular and sophisticated” tool that was able to bypass CAPTCHAs and other spam detection filters with ease. As SentinelOne explained, the bot was named not for any affiliation with the ransomware group Akira, but because that name, which means “bright” in Japanese, is used in a lot of the creators’ affiliated domains.

AkiraBot’s bottom line seems to be directing traffic to its dubious SEO scheme — and with GPT-4o-mini, that process seems to have been automated at scale. Having attempted to spam roughly 420,000 sites and successfully getting its trash through to some 80,000, the humans behind AkiraBot were almost certainly paying for access to OpenAI’s API — and we’ve reached out to the Altman-run company to confirm.

The bot’s chief targets, per SentinelOne’s investigation, were small and medium-sized businesses — and specifically, the contact forms and chat widgets on those companies’ websites. Using GPT-4o-mini to craft templates based on whichever type of contact module was at play, the spammers customized unique messages for each website in ways that got around spam filters at least part of the time.

Starting with instructions that tell OpenAI’s most cost-efficient advanced model to act like a “helpful assistant that generates marketing messages,” the bots’ creators operated for months before SentinelOne got wise to its spam scam.

In one example of an AkiraBot message from a targeted candle company’s comments section, a phony customer service rep named “Megan” shilled SEO services that were, per angry reviews left on the “Akira” trustpilot page, nonexistent.

“My name is Megan, from The Akira Team — I just noticed your website through your Entireweb Website Listing, and wanted to get in touch with you right away,” the spam message reads. “We have a special offer for your website today, and that is 1st Page Rankings in all major search engines (That’s Google, Yahoo and Bing) + social media and video commercial advertising starting at just $29.99 which I am ABSOLUTELY certain will benefit your website and business, by bringing you LOTS of new customers, very very quickly.”

Upon discovering and analyzing these bots and their output, SentinelOne’s researchers alerted OpenAI — and to the company’s credit, it immediately investigated and ultimately disabled the creators’ account.

Still, it managed to run in earnest between September 2024 and February 2025, when AkiraBot got caught — and there’s no way to know how long its creators, who weren’t named, paid OpenAI for access to its API.

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