In a small conference room off the cafeteria at one of OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco, a team of more than a dozen people are working around the clock to prevent anyone from using ChatGPT to disrupt this year’s midterm elections.

The operations center represents a vast expansion of the company’s nascent efforts ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Artificial intelligence tools were far less powerful at the time and the chatbot had a fifth of the one billion users it has today.

“The most available technology at the time in 2024 was text,” said Josh Lawson, the head of civic and strategic risk at OpenAI, who is leading the operation center. “We’re not just monitoring text anymore.”

Now, the potential threats include deep fakes, cyberattacks and foreign and domestic influence operations that can be created and launched with a series of prompts.