By Hailey O’Connor | December 2025
As artificial intelligence scales foreign influence campaigns to unprecedented levels, public entities are struggling to defend against the mass information warfare. Many governments have limited capacity to monitor, analyze, and respond to the evolving tactics of malign actors. A new report from the French Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee on “the emergence of artificial intelligence in foreign interference,” encourages public-private partnerships — naming NewsGuard specifically — to safeguard and mitigate the threat.
The French-language report outlines how Russian and Chinese influence operations have targeted people in the democracies with false and divisive claims. The report details how while public institutions work to safeguard democratic discourse, many government agencies lack the in-house expertise or resources to “effectively analyze the informational context.” Rather than waiting for these internal capabilities to mature, the report recommends that government agencies should leverage private-sector expertise. In making this case, the report cites multiple NewsGuard findings and names NewsGuard as an example of an expert private organization able to provide immediate support:
“Some groups may lack the resources to implement this type of tool or to formalize information verification processes. Similarly, many public administrations do not yet have the in-house expertise to effectively analyze the information context. Pending a general increase in capacity, better integration of the public and private sectors could partially address this problem and provide immediate operational resources. The skills of specialized companies would be a valuable resource for the ecosystem, either through support or direct partnership. For example, the company NewsGuard already compiles the main false claims circulating online through its “False Claim Fingerprints” catalog. The data collected is used by other private companies in various sectors, as well as by some search engines. The fact-checking teams include experienced journalists and editors who also produce reliability ratings of news sites based on nine journalistic and apolitical criteria. The widespread adoption of this type of rating, in the form of a true “nutritional label,” could provide greater clarity for consumers and increase the accountability of producers.”
By drawing on NewsGuard’s research and pointing to NewsGuard as an example of private-sector expertise, the French Parliamentary report signals an increasing understanding that countering information threats requires proactive and coordinated efforts across public and private organizations.