SAN FRANCISCO, JULY 09, 2026 – Chenope is pleased to announce the issuance of our latest patent, US Patent # 12651164, on using AI chatbots to detect and challenge inauthentic personae.

“This patent is an important one for two reasons” says Chenope CEO Elizabeth Charnock. “First, its focus is on novel methods for assessing the authenticity of online users, irrespective of whether that user is a regular human user, a promoter with an agenda, a status-seeking impostor, a shared user account, or simply an AI chatbot posing as human.

Are you actually who or what you say you are? is, and will remain, a critical and omnipresent question online. People are vastly more likely to believe what someone who is apparently very successful, well educated, and apparently credible on a given topic has to say about it than what the random guy on the street does. This is why establishing authenticity in different dimensions is so important.”

“Second, most people misunderstand what true disinformation or influence campaigns actually are. It’s not about fake news. When done well, it is about very gradually and subtly shifting the understanding of a target group on a given topic in a desired direction. It results in people holding a general view on the topic that they often cannot recall how exactly they acquired it, or even why it is that they believe what they believe. This makes the view very difficult to debunk because the belief is not clearly anchored to any particular fact, event, or experience.”

“Despite the increasing ubiquity of LLM-based chatbots, very few people are thinking about the extent to which the specific chatbots they are using are subtly shaping their views on a wide range of topics in different ways – not just on politics. In an enterprise use context, customers may find that some of this shaping is not aligned with their interests.”

This is Chenope’s 7th US patent.