Fake technology-news stories targeted Armenia’s Firebird AI project

The warning wore a familiar masthead

A supposed technology-news article predicted a major earthquake near the Firebird AI facility in Hrazdan. Another questioned the project’s power and cooling systems. According to Alethea’s investigation, these were fabrications on lookalike websites, not reporting by the publications they imitated.

The trick was borrowed credibility: make a manufactured allegation appear to have passed through a recognizable newsroom.

One target, changing danger stories

FIP’s July investigation follows the campaign from an earthquake alarm to electricity-collapse claims and an alleged Iranian threat. It reports that Armenian authorities rejected the earthquake prediction and said the grid connection had been assessed. Those official responses are not an independent engineering audit—but the campaign supplied no substantiated assessment for its catastrophic claims.

Open the examples

• Imitation publications: Alethea’s From Broadcast to Covert Operations section preserves the fake-page examples and the stolen-byline tactic.
• The sequence of posts: FIP reproduces the narratives and links its reporting trail.

The reports concern the same target and overlapping activity; they are not two separate campaigns. Neither establishes that this operation stopped the project.