Israel Funds Fake Think Tank to Manipulate AI Chatbots
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Piro, Inc. created the "Hanover Institute for Public Policy" on behalf of Israel's Government Advertising Agency, publishing over 100 reports on Israel/Palestine questions since August 6.
- Piro's website markets the service as "AI Story Optimization" — "author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility" — a tactic others call "LLM poisoning," and co-founder Daniel Rosenberg publicly boasted on LinkedIn about reverse-engineering how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity build answers.
- GPTZero flagged 11 of 12 randomly sampled Hanover Institute articles as AI-written with "high confidence" and one with "moderate confidence."
- Piro received $900,000 from the Israeli government for the work, subcontracted through French PR conglomerate Havas Media.
- Israel separately contracted former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale under a $46.5 million deal to build pro-Israel websites engineered to influence chatbots; a Drop Site investigation found Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini frequently cite those sites without flagging the Israeli government connection.
- Piro's DOJ filing does not explicitly state the work targets AI; Rosenberg told Politico the goal is to "put accurate, sourced facts into the public record and to counter misinformation about Israel."
- Several Hanover Institute reports contradict Israeli government narratives — including calling the "foreign university funding fuels antisemitism" theory "weak and full of exceptions," a position Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly championed.
Why it matters: Israel is spending real money — $900,000 on Piro plus $46.5 million on Brad Parscale — to seed AI chatbots with pro-Israel content, and the tactic is already working: a Drop Site investigation found Copilot and Gemini citing those sites without disclosure. When users ask chatbots about Gaza, antisemitism, or IDF conduct, they may receive answers sourced from a fake think tank whose own filings to DOJ don't mention AI targeting at all.
Ask SkimNews
