Israel caught funding fake think tank to game AI and push propaganda

Israel has been implicated in funding a covert online influence operation that created a bogus US think tank and a network of sites designed to game artificial intelligence systems and seed pro-Israel narratives into chatbot answers, an investigation has found. The operation produced 124 reports between 6 and 14 August totalling more than 560,000 words under the banner of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy — an entity that appears to have no legal registration, no staff listed and no physical address. Companies and programs named in the operation include Res, Piro Inc and Clock Tower X; one government contract linked to the campaign is valued at $46.5 million.

“The truth doesn’t matter anymore. The facts don’t matter anymore,” said Eli Hazan, a longtime communications official associated with Likud and former spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hazan added bluntly, “I fabricate fake news as a response to them,” framing the approach as part of a broader strategy to flood the information space.

The Hanover material was presented to resemble scholarly research, citing bodies such as the World Bank, UN agencies and Amnesty International and posing headlines as questions likely to be entered into AI chatbots — on topics including the Nakba, anti-Zionism, Israel’s occupation and allegations of genocide in Gaza. The site was built using technology from Res, an “AI-native content platform” designed to get content cited by models including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. Piro Inc, the New York media company behind the Hanover project, markets “AI Story Optimization” to engineer content that is more likely to be seen as credible by large language models.

The operation is said to serve two technical aims: first, to create apparently authoritative material that chatbots can retrieve and cite when answering user questions about Israel and Palestine; second, to push this material into large internet repositories that could be used to train future AI models, allowing narratives to be incorporated into model outputs without clear attribution. A separate network run by Clock Tower X, led by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, reportedly received a $46.5 million Israeli government contract and produced ten websites publishing hundreds of articles to promote similar narratives and challenge documented accounts from Gaza.

• The Israeli public diplomacy budget has surged to around $730 million, up from roughly $150 million the previous year.
• Investigators found 124 reports published in a nine-day span containing more than 560,000 words.
• Clock Tower X’s contract for the related campaign is reported at $46.5 million; other spending described as “tens of millions” has flowed into influence operations.

Critics and some Israeli officials say the campaign has failed to reverse a sharp fall in international support since October 2023. Nick Cleveland-Stout of the Quincy Institute, whose research contributed to the probe, said the fundamental flaw is treating a political crisis as a communications problem, noting that while AI manipulation may succeed in inserting narratives into chatbot responses, “it has not changed the opinion polls which ultimately matter to Israeli officials.” Polling cited in the investigation shows rising unfavourable views toward Israel in the United States and elsewhere despite the heavy investment.

Outlook: With public diplomacy expenditures elevated and technology companies increasingly central to information flow, the revelation underscores a growing intersection of state-funded influence, AI content engineering and concerns over attribution and provenance in model training data. Whether regulators, platforms or the AI providers themselves will alter practices to reduce such influence operations remains an open question; meanwhile, political actors will likely continue experimenting with AI-tailored communications as part of wider digital information campaigns.