{"id":142556,"date":"2026-08-17T16:48:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T16:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/142556\/"},"modified":"2026-08-17T16:48:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T16:48:15","slug":"israel-creates-fake-think-tank-in-likely-attempt-to-dupe-ai-chatbots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/142556\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a glance, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy looks like a new think tank dedicated to Israel\/Palestine. The organization churns out think-tank style reports on questions such as<\/a> \u201cDoes AIPAC Use \u2018Dark Money in Elections?\u201d and<\/a> \u201cIs Israel<\/a> Carrying out a Deliberate Campaign of Starvation in Gaza?\u201d <\/p>\n

But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank. None of the reports have bylines. A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee\u2019s \u201cInside Man.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Hanover Institute\u2019s reports \u2014 all of which are about Israel and Palestine \u2014 appear to be part of an Israeli effort to influence chatbots. The institute\u2019s \u201cdata reports\u201d have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini. Piro\u2019s website<\/a> says that it \u201cauthor(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,\u201d describing this service as “AI Story Optimization.” Others refer<\/a> to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence<\/a> as \u201cLLM poisoning.\u201d <\/p>\n

According to its \u201cabout\u201d page<\/a>, the Hanover Institute \u201cstudies the inputs fueling antisemitism in the United States, and publishes what the evidence shows.\u201d Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?\u201d <\/p>\n

In an article<\/a> titled \u201cIs the IDF the World\u2019s Most Moral Army?\u201d the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report<\/a> casts doubt on UNICEF’s assertion that \u201c90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed\u201d in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies. <\/p>\n

In a few cases, the Hanover Institute publishes what it claims are original findings. For instance, it put out a study<\/a> saying 19 of the 36 most-watched Israel-Gaza explainer videos contain contested claims, with most of the contested claims aligning with the Palestinian narrative. <\/p>\n

The Hanover Institute\u2019s publications sometimes contradict<\/a> Israeli government narratives. For instance, one report says that foreign funding of universities as an explanation for antisemitic incidents is \u201cweak and full of exceptions.\u201d Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu<\/a> has pushed this theory, telling<\/a> Breitbart last year that Europeans and Qataris have spent \u201cbillions of American universities, vilifying, vilifying Israel, vilifying Jews, also, frankly, vilifying the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alice Lee, an analyst at NewsGuard, a disinformation tracking company, told RS that the sites appear designed to reach a U.S. audience curious about the ongoing conflict, either through search engines or AI chatbots. “LLMs favor concrete statistics and data, as well as strong citations and sources, which these articles all have,” Lee said.<\/p>\n

“It’s a perfect mimicry of a typical credible American think tank, right down to the generic name, the site layout, and the red-white-blue color scheme,” Lee added.<\/p>\n

Piro, Inc, the firm that created the Hanover Institute, has received<\/a> $900,000 from the Israeli government for its work. Like many other<\/a> contractors working for Israel, Piro\u2019s work is subcontracted through Havas Media<\/a>, a French public relations conglomerate. <\/p>\n

The fake think tank has churned out over 100 reports since it started publishing on August 6. The Hanover Institute claims<\/a> that \u201ccited research is peer-reviewed and academic,\u201d although it frequently<\/a> cites<\/a> Israeli government sources such as the Israel Defense Forces and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. <\/p>\n

RS analyzed 12 random Hanover Institute articles using GPTZero, a popular AI detection software that claims a low false-positive rate. GPTZero flagged 11 of the articles as AI-written with \u201chigh confidence\u201d; it flagged one article as AI-written with \u201cmoderate confidence.\u201d <\/p>\n

Israel has also contracted<\/a> former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale to create pro-Israel websites engineered to influence chatbots as part of a $46.5 million contract. A Drop Site investigation<\/a> last month found that many chatbots, particularly Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, had been successfully trained on data from those websites. Other chatbots frequently cite those websites without flagging them as part of an Israeli influence operation.<\/p>\n

Piro does not explicitly state in its agreement submitted<\/a> to the Department of Justice that its work for Israel is to influence AI. In an email to Politico, which first reported the filing, Rosenberg said<\/a> his firm\u2019s work is to \u201cput accurate, sourced facts into the public record and to counter misinformation about Israel with verifiable information.\u201d However, last month, Rosenberg posted on LinkedIn advertising<\/a> Piro\u2019s ability to influence chatbots:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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\u2026At 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

From Your Site Articles<\/p>\n

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