SAN FRANCISCO, SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 – Chenope is pleased to announce the receipt of our latest patents, US Patent # 12651164 and #US 20260278427A1, for creating purpose-built AI chatbots to detect and challenge inauthentic personae. These complete a 4-part series of patents on a comprehensive and novel system for detecting and combatting state actor-level influence operations.
Are you actually who or what you say you are? is, and will remain, a critical and omnipresent question for anyone using online search, social media and other internet information sources. People are vastly more likely to believe a source who appears to be successful, well-educated, and authoritative on a given topic. Bad online actors, both human and AI bots, are specifically coached and programmed to deceive even discerning users. This is why establishing authenticity in different dimensions is so important.
“These patents are important for two reasons,” says Chenope CEO Elizabeth Charnock. “First, they recognize novel methods for assessing the authenticity of online users, whether that user is human scammer or troll, a promoter with a hidden agenda, or an AI chatbot posing as human.
“Second, using a common example, most people misunderstand what true disinformation or influence campaigns actually are. It’s not about fake news. When done well, it’s about gradually and subtly shifting the understanding of a target group on a given topic in a desired direction. It results in people having a view on a topic that they often cannot recall acquiring, 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 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.”
These are Chenope’s 7th and 8th US patent.
