Israeli-funded campaign shaped content to reach AI answers on Gaza
US filings put $100,000 behind a think tank whose ownership is disclosed only at the foot of its own website.
An Israeli-funded influence campaign registered in the United States has been publishing material in a form that improves its chances of being drawn on by AI systems when users ask them about Gaza, according to reports.
Filings submitted to the US Justice Department last week under the Foreign Agents Registration Act show that the advertising company Piro declared a $100,000 project to produce more than 12 pieces of content and post them under the name Hanover Institute for Public Policy. A notice at the foot of that institute's website states the material is distributed by Piro on behalf of Havas Media Germany, which in turn acts for Israel's government advertising agency, LaPam.
Many of the institute's reports carry no named author, and several are titled as questions rather than as findings, among them "Is there a starvation policy in Gaza?" — the phrasing a person is likelier to type into a chatbot than into a search box.
Journalists who tested a number of systems found ChatGPT and Perplexity citing the institute's material in some of their answers on Gaza, anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They also traced an identical copy of the institute's homepage to a site run by Res, a Seattle company selling technology meant to raise a client's odds of appearing in AI recommendations; the copy was taken down after they approached the company.
Piro's co-founder, Daniel Rosenberg, said the firm had been contracted by Israel, as its FARA registration discloses, to put accurate and sourced material into the public record, and Res's chief executive, Hai Tran, said his company's part was declared in a public filing of its own. The filings for the current campaign do not name the shaping of AI answers as an aim, unlike documents tied to an earlier Israeli effort.
What separates this from ordinary state advertising is where the disclosure sits. A reader who reaches the institute's website can scroll to the foot of the page and find out who paid for what is above it, but a system that summarises the page into a few sentences does not carry that line into its answer, so the sourcing falls away at exactly the point the claim reaches the reader.