OpenAI’s latest model, ChatGPT-4o, is sending users to a malicious website that spams them with fake virus warnings, fake software updates, and more.

According to Futurism, ChatGPT-4o is recommending users visit a website called County Local News (please don’t go to this site, that’s why we didn’t link it) in response to some queries. Going to the site prompts a slew of popup warnings advertising Adobe Flash Player updates and other software. As the outlet discovered, clicking on one of the warnings makes things much worse, as the site starts displaying fake virus warnings claiming to be from McAfee.

Mark Stockley, a cybersecurity expert at Malwarebytes, told the outlet that users could be duped into downloading a “Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP), a type of software that they probably don’t want, that might be annoying or hard to remove,” saying the “PUP might be what they meant to download, a download that’s different from the one they were expecting, or additional unwanted downloads alongside the one they were expecting.”

“In the last 18 months, we have seen a huge surge in malicious advertising (malvertising) as a vector for spreading malware,” he told Futurism. “Criminals take out ads on legitimate ad networks to lure people to fake websites and trick them into downloading malware, thinking it’s a legitimate program.”

“Malvertising mimics well-known brands and is extremely hard to spot,” Stockley continued, “and the criminals who do it are able to abuse the ad networks’ sophisticated targeting controls to make sure that people see fake ads for things they are likely to want.”

McAfee slammed ChatGPT for sending users to such a dangerous site.

“Scammers are early adopters to trending technology. ChatGPT and similar technologies are seeing massive growth creating opportunities for scammers to profit,” a spokesperson told Futurism. “Early indicators seem to suggest that users trust the output of these systems… Without further education, users may find themselves susceptible to misinformation, including scams, that find their way into these systems.”

The issue is the latest plaguing AI systems and demonstrate why so many users still don’t trust AI models. In this specific instance, trust issues are made worse by the fact that ChatGPT is apparently ignoring multiple creditable sites, opting to send users to County Local News instead.