Israel funds fake think tank to shape AI chatbot responses in its favour

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A synthetic Israel-funded think tank has published more than 100 articles since it launched less than a month ago. First spotted by Politico , the Hanover Institute for Public Policy is run by the American advertising firm Piro Inc, paid for by Israel, and appears designed to generate content for LLMs that are continually scanning the internet to inform their responses, with the goal of tweaking chatbot answers in favor of Israel.

Every few days, the Hanover Institute publishes around a dozen articles related to Israel, antisemitism, and Palestine. Every article’s headline has a question. The articles have no byline, often contain graphs, and cite real sources but do not link to them.

The articles ask questions like How Much Palestinian Land Has Israel Taken? , Why Is Israel Seen as the Aggressor? , and Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza? The answers often read like word salad nonsense. “A reader who has encountered the claim as a consensus has encountered something real,” one article said about Israel restricting food supply to Gaza.

“The reframe is the denominator. Six documents from five bodies is a count of assertions, not a change in the kind of evidence available,” it said. “Adding a seventh organization stating the same conclusion does not convert an organizational determination into an adjudicated finding, because the evidentiary route is the same in each case: a body assembling material, applying its own threshold, and publishing.”

The site’s about page said the lack of a byline was “the convention at institutional publishers” and that it wants readers to weigh the sources “rather than the author.”

“Accountability for the material is not anonymous,” Hanover said on its about page. “The registrant responsible for distributing it is named in the disclosure at the foot of every page and on the public register at the Department of Justice, where each report is filed. The researchers are not named because a finding should stand or fall on its sources rather than on the standing of whoever assembled it, and because the subject attracts harassment. That is a considered editorial position, not an oversight.”

An analysis from AI detection tool Pangram found that three Hanover Institute articles we tested were written entirely by AI. Only the bibliography at the end of each article was human written, according to Pangram. The images, too, are AI generated.

There’s evidence that Hanover’s articles are not just written by LLMs, but are also written for LLMs. The site has an llms.txt , a webpage markdown that’s designed to make it easier for LLMs to scrape a website and the “registrant responsible for distributing” is the marketing firm Piro, which advertises a service to manipulate chatbot answers on its website.

Piro did not return 404 Media’s request for comment, but co-founder Daniel Rosenberg explained how its system worked in a post on LinkedIn . “Every day, more buying journeys begin with an AI conversation instead of a Google search. If the models don't understand your story, they'll tell someone else's,” he said.

“The question was: how do you make sure AI knows how to tell them? We spent the last year searching for the best technical minds in the space, learning how AI models discover, evaluate, and synthesize information across the web,” he said on LinkedIn. “Then we built a process that brings both disciplines together: identify where a brand's narrative is thin, inconsistent, or missing, then strengthen the signals that shape how AI understands and explains it [...] We call it AI Story Optimization .”

Prio’s website explained more. “Search is no longer about keywords. It’s about story. About trust. Not only the trust of a language model deciding whether to cite you, but the trust of the actual human being reading that answer and deciding whether to buy. That is two audiences in one sentence: the engine that recommends you, and the person who believes it,” Piro said on a page advertising its AI Story Optimization service.

“We map every surface the models read. Reddit threads, YouTube transcripts, G2 reviews, publisher pages, forums, comparison sites, and we score each one by how much it actually shapes what the engines say about you. Not a vanity dashboard. A ranked map of real influence,” Piro said on its website.

Hanover is registered as a foreign agent with the United States government which means it has to file paperwork disclosing its broad goals and its funding. According to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) paperwork reviewed by 404 Media, Piro is working with LaPam — the Israeli government’s official advertising agency: “Piro, Inc. will provide strategic communications and media relations services in connection with LaPam’s engagement on behalf of the State of Israel,” the paperwork states. Piro has also uploaded copies of each article to FARA’s website.

According to FARA paperwork, these activities are political and “may include the creation and dissemination of factual, source-supported informational materials intended to educate the U.S. public regarding Israel and related issues through publicly distributed content.”

The FARA paperwork also included two invoices from HAVAS Media — a European advertising agency working for Israel — provided to Piro for its services. One invoice dated April 30, 2026, included a total of $900,000 to develop the project. “Services include audience research, content architecture, scriptwriting, asset production, distribution planning, interactive performance analysis, and final program evaluation. All content is developed for distribution via digital and social media platforms in the United States.” Another invoice filed on June 20 showed that HAVAS paid Piro an additional $100,000 for two months of work.

“It shouldn't surprise any of us that Israel is funding a disinformation and propaganda machine intended to manipulate the American public,” Margaret DeReus, the executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, told 404 Media. “This is just the newest iteration of what Israel has been doing for decades and it isn't working. No amount of chatbot manipulation can reverse the massive surge in public support for Palestinian freedom"

Hanover’s articles feel impersonal, a dry reading of complicated and deadly conflicts. According to its website, however, the work is deeply personal.

“The Institute’s original founder traced this work to a moment in his own childhood. At ten, he asked the man his grandmother had married about the numbers tattooed on his arm; the man had survived Auschwitz. What a child could not fully grasp, the adult came to understand: that such hatred is recent rather than distant, that it reached within a single lifetime and within his own family,” the website said . “That is his account of why the work exists. It is not offered as a credential for it.”

The Hanover Institute did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.