News

Tel Aviv creates fake think tank to ‘poison’ AI chatbots with pro-Israel narratives

August 18, 2026

Israel has created a fictitious think tank as part of a digital influence campaign designed to feed pro-Israel narratives into artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, Responsible Statecraft (RS) reported on 17 August.

US public relations firm Piro, Inc. received $900,000 from the Israeli Government Advertising Agency to create the Hanover Institute, which uses AI to write reports painting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and colonization of the West Bank in a positive light.

Since 6 August, the Hanover Institute has issued over 100 reports, which are deliberately crafted to influence AI chatbots to use its content when drafting answers for users.

“At first glance, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy looks like a new think tank dedicated to Israel/Palestine … But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank,” RS wrote.

Hanover issues think-tank-style reports on questions such as “Does AIPAC Use Dark Money in Elections?” and “Is Israel Carrying out a Deliberate Campaign of Starvation in Gaza?”

However, the reports do not list any authors and include a small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage that notes the institute was created on behalf of the Israeli government.

The reports include footnotes and are written in a neutral tone, making them attractive as content used by AI chatbots such as Claude or Gemini, a practice known as “LLM poisoning.”

Piro’s website openly states that it creates “content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” a method it describes as “AI Story Optimization.”

NEW: Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has registered as a foreign agent for Israel to create pro-Israel content to target Gen Z audiences, according to The Hill.

The contract for Parscale's Clocktower X LLC is worth $6 million.

Israel wants Parscale to "help game… pic.twitter.com/oANaZSpXNV

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 30, 2025

Many of the reports have titles that mimic neutral questions that chatbot users might ask about Israel and Palestine, such as “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?” or “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”

The articles then use Israeli sources to present a pro-Israel perspective in answering the question.

An article entitled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” cites a 2022 poll that found that 47 percent of Israeli Jews believed that statement.

Another report tries to refute the findings of a UNICEF report stating that 90 percent of water and other infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed in Gaza.

Many reports link to articles claiming that anti-Semitism is on the rise, a tactic meant to deflect from Israel’s actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

RS used GPTZero software to analyze 12 Hanover Institute articles and determine if the were written by a human author or by AI. GPTZero flagged 11 of the articles as AI-written with “high confidence.” It flagged the final article as AI-written with “moderate confidence.”

Piro co-founder Daniel Rosenberg boasted on LinkedIn about his firm’s ability to influence chatbots:

“When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about your category, an answer comes back in one confident paragraph. Most brands have no idea how that paragraph gets built. So we spent months reverse-engineering it … At Piro, we already knew how to build stories that move people. The question was: how do you make sure AI knows how to tell them?”

Public opinion in the US has grown increasingly negative toward Israel, which relies on US military aid to wage its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing campaign in south Lebanon.

According to a recent Pew Research Poll, 60 percent of people in the US have a very or somewhat unfavorable view of Israel, up nearly 20 points since 2022.

Israeli forces have killed at least 73,000 Palestinians since the genocide began in 2023, with some estimates suggesting over 200,000 Palestinians have been killed.