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Jacob Wendler@jacob_wendler · Aug 14, 2026

Scoop: Israel has launched a new effort to sway public opinion in the US by influencing how LLMs paint it in response…

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Summary

Israel has launched a covert influence campaign to shape how AI language models respond to questions about Israel and Gaza. The effort involves a fake think tank called the Hanover Institute that publishes articles specifically designed to be ingested by ChatGPT and other LLMs, with evidence showing the content is already appearing in AI-generated responses.

Summarized by ThreadOut AI from the full thread. May miss nuance — read the thread below.

  1. #1

    Scoop: Israel has launched a new effort to sway public opinion in the US by influencing how LLMs paint it in response to chatbot queries. The foreign influence campaign includes a fake think tank set up to feed content to tools like ChatGPT. More below @politico 🧵

  2. #2

    Earlier this week, French PR firm Havas Media — which handles most of Israel’s FARA work in the US — revealed that one of its contractors, Piro, was responsible for dozens of articles on hanoverinstitute.com.

  3. #3

    The site features “data reports” with no named authors, all of which have headlines that feature questions like “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” and “Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza?” — a telltale sign that the articles are designed to feed data to LLMs.

  4. #4

    Havas said only that the campaign is aimed at “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.” So how do we know it’s targeting LLMs?

  5. #5

    Well, the site’s technical markers link it to Res — a Seattle-based startup that helps clients get recommended by AI models. The webpage hanoverinstitute.com/llms.txt also includes instruction for LLMs to digest its content.

  6. #6

    After I reached out for comment, all mentions of Res disappeared from the page (original version below). A mirror version of the “Hanover Institute” site hosted on tryres.ai/hanover also became unavailable after I reached out.

  7. #7

    The campaign appears to be working, at least in terms of retrieval: Both ChatGPT and Perplexity cited Hanover content several times in neutral tests conducted by POLITICO when prompted with questions about Gaza, antisemitism and the IDF.

  8. #8

    The new campaign comes after Havas hired former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to sway GPT results on Israel’s behalf, as @nick_clevelands and @EricCortellessa have reported. dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-…

  9. #9

    @nick_clevelands @EricCortellessa More in today’s PI: politico.com/newsletters/po…