DOJ filings show Israel's $46.5m Parscale contract included a plan to manipulate AI answers on Gaza

Perplexity, the AI search engine, was asked in a test published by Drop Site News on 28 July 2026 whether it is beneficial for the United States to enhance military cooperation with Israel. It answered yes. Its top source was allyvia.org, a site publishing articles such as "The Economic and Security Benefits of U.S. Support for Israel". Perplexity's answer gave no sign that the site was paid for by a foreign government. Allyvia's own footer carries the line required by US law: "This material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC."

Clock Tower X LLC, based in Medina, Ohio, is owned by Brad Parscale, Donald Trump's 2020 campaign manager. Parscale registered it with the Justice Department on 18 September 2025 as a foreign agent, registration 7649. Its contract, signed on 8 September 2025 with Havas Media Germany GmbH of Frankfurt, lists the State of Israel as the supervising entity. The statement of work attached to that contract commits Clock Tower X to the "deployment of websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations."

Perplexity's answer, allyvia.org, Clock Tower X, Havas Media Germany and the Israeli state are each documented on the public record, and together they show that the Israeli government paid for an effort aimed at chatbot answers and that at least two commercial chatbots surfaced its product.

Claude, a model made by Anthropic, was used in researching and drafting this article. Anthropic is one of the companies whose systems are discussed, and Claude is one of the chatbots that published tests have examined.

The contract

Havas Media Germany GmbH, part of the French advertising group Havas, is the prime contractor for a set of Israeli government communications campaigns in the United States. The FARA filings name it as the foreign principal for at least six US registrants. Behind it, depending on the filing, stand the State of Israel, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Israel Government Advertising Agency, known by its Hebrew acronym Lapam. Eran Shayovich, chief of staff at the foreign ministry, leads the programme, known internally as Project 545 after its 2025 budget of 545 million shekels, about $150 million.

Clock Tower X's original contract ran from 8 September to 31 December 2025 at $1.5 million a month, a total of $6 million. At least 90 per cent had to go on production, media spend, talent, distribution, analytics and reporting, and up to 10 per cent on support costs. Texas law governs the agreement. A first amendment, dated November 2025 with the day left blank and filed on 26 December, added $3 million, bringing the contract to $9 million.

Clock Tower X's supplemental statement for the period to 31 March 2026, signed by Parscale on 18 May 2026, reports $15 million received from Havas, plus an $850,000 "loan" from Havas dated 7 November 2025. It reports $13,061,802.50 in disbursements, including a $750,000 "loan repayment" to Parscale on 11 December 2025. The filings in the public docket do not contain a contract covering January to March 2026, so $6 million of the receipts to 31 March is not matched by a published statement of work.

A new work order dated 2 June 2026 and filed on 7 June sets a fee of $4.5 million a month for "Digital Advertising" from 1 April to 31 October 2026. Seven months at that rate comes to $31.5 million. Added to the $15 million received by 31 March, the total is $46.5 million. The 2026 work order contains no language about AI or GPT. No renewal beyond 31 October 2026 has been filed.

About $13 million of Clock Tower X's receipts went to Republican digital firms: just under $5 million to Portman Road Strategies, run by Mike Shields; $6 million to SparkFire Technologies; more than $500,000 to Salem Media Representatives for advertising; and about $500,000 to Three Tech. Parscale is chief strategy officer of Salem Media Group, and the Clock Tower X contract requires "integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels."

Piro, Inc., of 244 Fifth Avenue, New York, owned equally by Daniel Rosenberg and Timothy Piper, registered as foreign agent 7732 on 2 June 2026. Its foreign principal is "Havas Media Germany GmbH on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam)." A work order dated 30 April 2026 sets a fee of $900,000, of which $400,000 is production hard costs and $190,000 strategy and content development. A second work order dated 20 July 2026 adds $100,000 at $50,000 a month. Piro's contracts describe "a pilot digital communications program" involving audience research, content architecture, scriptwriting and video. Neither mentions AI, chatbots or search.

Havas has four other US subcontractors registered under FARA since 2025 whose filed work targets people through social media, churches and advertising rather than search:

• SKDKnickerbocker, registration 7552, was paid $600,000 over 12 months from 1 April 2025 to "develop a bot-based program on various social media channels (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, Linkedin and YouTube) that 'floods the zone' with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' pro-Israel message."
• Bridges Partners LLC, registration 7652, run by Uri Steinberg and Yair Levi, received about $900,000 between 16 June and 30 November 2025 to pay US social media influencers, reportedly about $7,000 a post, in what filings and reporting call the Esther Project.
• Show Faith by Works LLC, registration 7653, has a budget of $3,258,961 to geofence more than 300 megachurches in California, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado and tour a mobile "10/7 Experience" trailer. It reported $2,313,791.50 received by 31 March 2026.
• Targeted Communications Global LLC, registration 7553, a Stagwell company, billed Lapam through Havas Media Group USA $1,545,000 a month for strategy from September to December 2025 plus $3.7 million in advertising, about $9.9 million in all.

Lapam also bought advertising directly. An Israeli procurement notice shows a contract worth 150 million shekels, about $45 million, with Google for YouTube and Display & Video 360 from 17 June to 31 December 2025, alongside $3 million with X and $2.1 million with Outbrain and Teads. Those are disclosed ad purchases from the platforms themselves.

Israel's public diplomacy budget has grown each year of the war. It was about $7.5 million a year before 7 October 2023, about $150 million in 2025 and about $730 million in 2026. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar has said that spending on public diplomacy "should be like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors."

Parscale's other clients and contacts

Clock Tower X's registration for Israel is the only foreign-agent registration on record for Brad Parscale. A search of the FARA database found none for Parscale Strategy, Campaign Nucleus or EyesOver, his other companies, all of which share Clock Tower X's address in Medina, Ohio.

Parscale told the Associated Press in May 2024 that Campaign Nucleus, his AI campaign software business backed by the Texas oil billionaire Tim Dunn, had expanded into Israel, India, Brazil and the Balkans, and that in Israel it was "helping over there a lot with the war with Hamas." He named no clients. On a business trip to Israel in 2024 he told officials his companies were "probably the largest thing outside of Fox News to help fight misinformation and Jewish hatred". His contact at the foreign ministry is Eran Shayovich. No documented meeting between Parscale and Benjamin Netanyahu, Gideon Sa'ar, Ron Dermer or the Israeli embassy has been found, and Clock Tower X's supplemental statement discloses no contacts with Israeli officials or members of Congress.

Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentine consultant, is Parscale's partner in Latin American campaigns. Cerimedo's Buenos Aires firm Numen ran digital strategy for Javier Milei's presidential campaign in 2023. On 10 March 2025 Cerimedo announced that he had become the exclusive representative and licensee in Latin America for Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver. The two men have been partners in Numen since about 2023, and Parscale travelled to Bolivia during the campaign of Rodrigo Paz, who won the presidency in 2025. "Brad set up all the infrastructure that I work with," Cerimedo told the Times. Cerimedo thanked Parscale at a Mar-a-Lago gala in February 2026 "for believing [in] me all the time, and giving me your technology."

Parscale advised Nasry Asfura's campaign in Honduras from the United States, coaching Numen's team on using data to target voters without travelling to the region. Trump endorsed Asfura on Truth Social before the vote on 30 November 2025 and pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president from Asfura's party serving a US sentence for drug trafficking, who was released on 1 December. Cerimedo told The Economist that he coordinated Trump's post. "I had no contact at all with the administration, including the president, about the election in Honduras or the pardon," Parscale told the Times. Marlon Ochoa, a member of Honduras's electoral council for the opposition Libre party, has accused Cerimedo of vote fraud. No electoral authority has ruled on the claim, and it does not name Parscale.

No contract between Parscale or any of his companies and a Latin American campaign or government has been published. The licence Cerimedo announced in March 2025 is the only documented commercial arrangement between the two, and its terms have not been disclosed. The Times wrote that Numen's 2023 work for Milei appears in a Justice Department filing without identifying it. La Jornada and other outlets have since attributed that work to FARA registration 6898. Registration 6898 belongs to Latin America Advisory Group LLC, run by Damián Merlo, and covers a $780,000-a-year agreement with the office of El Salvador's president dated 31 January 2026. It does not mention Numen, Cerimedo, Milei or Parscale. Milei said on 22 August 2026 that Cerimedo had no link of any kind with his government.

Cerimedo's livestream of 4 November 2022, "O Brasil foi roubado", claimed Jair Bolsonaro's defeat was fraudulent and drew more than 415,000 viewers. Brazil's electoral court removed it, and the Federal Police indicted Cerimedo in November 2024 as part of the disinformation cell in the coup investigation. The prosecutor general left him out of the February 2025 charges, writing that it had not been shown that he knew the fraud report he promoted was fabricated. No source links Parscale to Bolsonaro's 2022 campaign. Colombia's president Gustavo Petro has alleged that Cerimedo ran about two million bot profiles in the June 2026 presidential vote, an allegation that has not been tested.

Bolivian police detained Cerimedo at Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz on 18 August 2026, the morning after his former partner Nadia Beller was shot outside a hotel in the city. Prosecutors charged him with attempted femicide, alleging he directed the attack remotely, and later with illicit enrichment. He is held in preventive detention for 180 days and has not been tried. Paz said on 27 August that there was never a contract with Cerimedo and that he had no authority to represent the Bolivian state. Cerimedo carried business cards reading "Principal Advisor to the President" and had a presidential email address, and Vice-President Edman Lara said Cerimedo controlled access to Paz. On 30 September Beller published three undated photographs showing Cerimedo with Donald Trump Jr., Parscale and a third man, Andy Rivas, and alleged that Parscale received commissions through the fuel company Futura. Beller has not published evidence for the commission allegation, and Parscale has not responded to it publicly. No investigation in any country names Parscale.

Bloomberg reported on 8 September 2026 that Parscale and the former Colombo crime family captain Michael Franzese were among 13 guests at a dinner in Tallinn on 6 September at which Trump Jr. and Estonia's foreign minister Margus Tsahkna discussed Ukraine. No Estonian outlet has named Parscale among the guests. Parscale has made no statement about the dinner. Parscale was among the campaign officials to whom Trump Jr. forwarded a direct message from WikiLeaks in September 2016.

Parscale told the House Intelligence Committee on 24 October 2017 that he had no interaction with the Russian government while working on the Trump campaign, and when asked whether it had tried to contact him, he said: "Not that I know of." No documented contact between Parscale and any Russian official or Russia-linked figure has emerged since. Cambridge Analytica, whose staff he hired in 2016, had contacts with the Russian oil company Lukoil, but no source ties those contacts to him. Parscale is not among the named guests at Trump Jr.'s Bahamas wedding in May 2026, which the Putin ally Umar Kremlev helped pay for. No source has described any meeting involving Parscale as secret.

An unnamed Israeli official told TIME in July 2026: "We are pissed at Brad Parscale. He was supposed to make things better." Vice President JD Vance said days later on The Joe Rogan Experience that a "very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign" was trying "to derail the negotiation" over the US-Iran deal, citing Parscale. "I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump," Parscale told TIME.

What "GPT framing" means in the documents

Clock Tower X's September 2025 statement of work contains the phrase "GPT framing results on GPT conversations" once, and the December 2025 version repeats it. "GPT" is the only AI term in the contract apart from "MarketBrew AI". The contract does not name ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Perplexity, Google Search or Google's AI Overviews. It does not use the words "LLM", "training data" or "generative engine optimisation". An earlier report that the contract contained the phrase "content to condition GPT" could not be matched to any filing.

Clock Tower X's statement of work sets the GPT line among search commitments. Under the heading "Search and Language Operations (MarketBrew)", Clock Tower X commits to "monthly search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns using the MarketBrew AI platform to improve the visibility and ranking of relevant narratives", "monthly analysis of search landscape shifts and adjustments to content and placement strategy" and "delivery of a minimum of 20 pages per month across priority keywords." Elsewhere the contract requires 100 root creative assets a month, 5,000 variants a month, at least 50 million paid impressions a month at an average cost under $2 per thousand, and at least 80 per cent of content tailored to Gen Z audiences on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and podcasts. The only target country named is the United States.

MarketBrew sells software that models how search engines rank pages. Scott Stouffer, its chief technology officer, told Axios in April 2026: "There's a misconception that you can somehow influence or persuade AI systems directly. That's not really how they work. What you can do is make sure that your information is structured, sourced, and aligned in a way that those systems are more likely to retrieve it when someone asks a question."

Clock Tower X's SEO clauses and Stouffer's account both point to a reading in which "GPT" is used generically for chatbots and that the aim is for chatbot answers to adopt the campaign's framing by retrieving and citing its pages. That reading is analysis. The documents do not say which products were targeted, and no contractor has explained the wording on the record. Press reports have named ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok as targets without publishing a document that does.

How to steer a chatbot from the outside

Chatbots take in outside information by two routes. Pre-training absorbs vast web scrapes before a model is released; Common Crawl, a non-profit that publishes monthly snapshots of the web, is one of the main sources. Retrieval happens at the moment a user asks a question: the system runs a web search, reads the top results and writes an answer that may cite them. Perplexity and Copilot lean heavily on retrieval. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini retrieve when search is switched on or the question calls for it.

Retrieval systems are the more direct target, because a page that ranks well for the words people type into chatbots is likely to be read and cited. Researchers at Princeton and elsewhere named the practice generative engine optimisation in a 2023 paper, and found that adding citations, quotations and statistics to a page could raise its visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40 per cent. The techniques overlap with ordinary search optimisation: keyword targeting, question-shaped headlines, structured data, fast publication, backlinks and sites that allow every crawler.

Common Crawl inclusion makes a page available to model builders, but companies filter, deduplicate and weight their data, and many run their own crawlers. Anthropic researchers, working with the UK AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, reported in October 2025 that as few as 250 malicious documents could implant a hidden trigger phrase in a model regardless of its size. That study concerned backdoors, a narrow technical attack. It did not show that a few hundred articles could change a model's views on a political question.

Russia's Pravda network is the documented precedent. NewsGuard reported in March 2025 that the network published about 3.6 million articles in 2024 across roughly 150 domains, and that 10 leading chatbots repeated its false narratives 33 per cent of the time when prompted on them. The American Sunlight Project called the practice "LLM grooming". John Mark Dougan, a former Florida sheriff's deputy now living in Moscow, said in a recorded talk quoted by NewsGuard: "by pushing these Russian narratives from the Russian perspective, we can actually change worldwide AI."

The Clock Tower X sites

Clock Tower X's FARA filings list 10 websites and a YouTube channel called Allies for Peace. Drop Site News counted how many times Common Crawl captured each site between January and June 2026:

Common Crawl captured the sites twice in January and 376 times in May. The Guardian reported in August that seven of the sites appeared 294 times in Common Crawl's July index.

Justorium.org was already filed as FARA material by 23 November 2025, as the "Justorium Journal", with the Clock Tower X disclaimer. A 40-page informational-materials filing received by the Justice Department's FARA unit on 14 July 2026 contains articles from six of the sites, each carrying the same disclaimer:

• CompassionPulse.org, "Reconstruction Requires More Than Money" (14 July 2026), which opens: "The destruction in Gaza is immense. Money, however, has never been Gaza's principal problem."
• Justorium.org, "Iran's Commitments Are Meaningless If It Keeps Attacking Commercial Ships" (13 July 2026).
• FactSignal.org, "Iran May Already Be Rebuilding Its Nuclear Program" (13 July 2026).
• Cognitura.org, "Behind the Front Groups: How Iran Uses Fake Organizations to Target Civilians" (14 July 2026).
• Allyvia.org, "The Economic and Security Benefits of U.S. Support for Israel" (12 July 2026).
• PaxPoint.org, "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: History, Claims, and Current Issues" (12 July 2026).

The Justice Department's online docket files that July bundle under Piro's registration, 7732, rather than Clock Tower X's, 7649. The document carries only Clock Tower X disclaimers and does not mention Piro or Hanover. The misplacement may be a clerical error by the filer or the FARA unit. Neither firm has explained it publicly.

All 10 domains have generic names that carry no reference to Israel, Havas or Clock Tower X in the domain. Each discloses its funding in a footer. No reporting has established shared analytics identifiers, shared hosting or systematic cross-linking between the sites, and their domain registration records and archive capture histories have not been published.

The Hanover Institute

Hanoverinstitute.com calls itself the Hanover Institute for Public Policy. Its about page describes a mission to study "the inputs fueling antisemitism in the United States." It names no researchers, citing the need for findings to "stand or fall on its sources" and the risk of harassment. It gives no address and no legal entity. Individual reports are bylined "Data Report by The Hanover Institute".

Piro, Inc. built and runs it. The site's footer, read on 29 September 2026, states: "This material is distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam)." A second sentence follows: "This disclosure identifies the contractual relationship among the parties and does not indicate authorship or editorial control." Its funding page cites FARA registration 7732 and describes the institute as having been "established and publishing before that funding existed." It adds that the funder "does not select topics, does not see drafts, does not review findings, and approves nothing before publication."

Piro's first work order is dated 30 April 2026. The earliest Hanover report found in the FARA docket, "Which Antisemitic Narratives Are Gaining Search Attention?", is dated 26 June 2026 and marked as updated on 6 August. The site launched around 6 August 2026. Piro filed 26 informational-materials documents with the Justice Department on 7 August. No Hanover publication dated before Piro's contract was signed has been found, and the site's domain registration date has not been published.

The Guardian counted 124 reports and more than 560,000 words published between 6 and 14 August, including 73 reports totalling about 354,000 words on 12 and 13 August alone. By 29 September the research index listed more than 140 reports. Cybernews ran 12 sampled articles through the detector GPTZero, which flagged all 12 as AI-written, 11 with high confidence. 404 Media ran three through Pangram, which judged them entirely AI-written apart from their bibliographies, and found the images AI-generated. AI detectors are probabilistic tools with known error rates, but two different detectors agreed and the publication rate, about 177,000 words a day at its peak, is beyond any staffed think tank.

Cybernews found that Hanover's site has a robots.txt file admitting every crawler, a roughly 6,000-word llms.txt file (a newer convention that summarises a site for AI systems) and every report set to a sitemap priority of 0.8. The Guardian found that the llms.txt file initially contained the default configuration of Res, which describes itself as an "AI-native content platform" and advertises helping sites get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. Hai Tran, Res's founder, registered under FARA as a Piro subcontractor on 22 July 2026. Headlines are written as the questions people ask chatbots: "Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza?", "Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?", "Is the IDF the World's Most Moral Army?"

Rosenberg markets Piro's service as "AI Story Optimization". He wrote on LinkedIn: "If the models don't understand your story, they'll tell someone else's." He said Piro was hired "to put accurate, sourced facts into the public record and to counter misinformation about Israel with verifiable information."

Hanover is a government-funded content operation using the name and format of a policy institute, with anonymous authors, no institutional existence beyond a website, largely machine-written text and a publication rate no research staff could match. It is not concealed in the legal sense: it discloses its funder and FARA number on every page. The evidence supports calling it a government-funded think-tank brand. Its claim to have existed before the funding is unsupported by anything found.

What the material argues

Hanover's research index is dominated by the subjects on which Israel faces the heaviest international scrutiny. A count of the index on 29 September found more than 35 reports on Gaza and civilian harm, at least 18 on antisemitism and anti-Zionism, at least 15 on apartheid allegations, 12 or more on genocide, 12 on settlements and land, and at least eight on AIPAC and lobbying. Individual titles address the Gaza Health Ministry's casualty lists, starvation, October 7 intelligence warnings and campus protests.

Hanover's genocide report, dated 11 August 2026, opens by acknowledging that the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry found in September 2025 that Israeli authorities and forces had committed four of the five acts listed in the Genocide Convention. It then stresses that the commission's finding is "an investigative finding rather than a judgment of a court", records the International Association of Genocide Scholars resolution as backed by 86 per cent of voting members, and groups Amnesty International and B'Tselem among bodies with a "stated advocacy mission". It does not mention the case South Africa brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Its conclusion: "A reader who wants the answer from an authority that binds will not find it in this record."

Hanover's starvation report, dated 12 August 2026, acknowledges that the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine in Gaza City in August 2025. It cites the International Criminal Court's warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, which include starvation as a method of warfare, only at the "reasonable grounds" threshold and sets them against the higher standard for conviction. It reports the Israeli military liaison body COGAT's figure of 1,778,363 tonnes of food entering Gaza. It does not mention the 11-week total blockade of Gaza from 2 March to 19 May 2025. Its conclusion separates "measured deprivation" from intent that "has not been adjudicated".

Individual statements in the Hanover reports are mostly accurate, and none of them denies that people died or starved: no court has ruled on the merits of genocide or starvation in Gaza. The slant comes from selection. Findings by UN bodies, human rights organisations and genocide scholars are recast as opinions awaiting a court, Israeli government figures appear as data, and events that weigh against Israel, such as the spring 2025 blockade, are left out. Answers built from such pages would tend towards "the question is unresolved", a position that sits closer to the Israeli government's than to the findings of the UN inquiry, the IPC or the ICC pre-trial chamber.

NAZA, a documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor produced by the Guardian with Jonathan Glazer, won a jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026. It features 24 anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers describing strikes approved with hundreds of expected civilian deaths and AI-assisted targeting. The Israeli military said it "has never planned, approved, or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians or anything near that number were anticipated to be killed." Hanover published nine reports on the film on 22 and 23 September, including "Does the IDF Deliberately Target Civilians, as NAZA Alleges?" and "Does AI Decide Who the IDF Strikes, as NAZA Alleges?"

Clock Tower X's filed material is closer to conventional advocacy. Its titles argue that US support for Israel pays economic and security dividends, that money has "never been Gaza's principal problem" and that Iran remains a nuclear and maritime threat. Several July 2026 articles concern Iran rather than Gaza, following the June 2026 US-Iran memorandum the Justorium piece discusses.

What chatbots actually did

Published tests of chatbots against the Israeli-funded material have produced mixed results. Every test was a small sample on a single date, and chatbot answers vary between runs, users and locations. No test has been repeated at scale with a published prompt log.

Drop Site's original page could not be loaded, and its findings here come from republications by the Quincy Institute and others. According to those versions, Drop Site reported that ChatGPT and Claude reached the sites only through live search, while Gemini and Copilot showed signs of having the material in training data. The published reposts do not set out how that distinction was tested, and it should be treated as unverified.

Politico wrote that the citations "do not prove the models were trained on the material or that their overall outputs have been influenced." Novara reported that Piro's own tests had found models drawing on Hanover.

Every published finding is a citation: the chatbot names the campaign site as a source. Citations show the material reaching users through AI search and retrieval.

Training data or search results

Israel's contractors built sites designed to be crawled, ranked and retrieved: question-form headlines, SEO campaigns modelled with MarketBrew, llms.txt files, open robots.txt rules and high publication volume. Those are techniques aimed at search engines and at the retrieval systems chatbots use. The contract's GPT line states the goal as framing "results on GPT conversations", which describes the answer a user sees and says nothing about training.

Common Crawl's 912 captures show the Clock Tower X sites entered a corpus that model builders use. They do not show that any company's training set included them, or at what weight. No AI company has said whether it trained on the sites, and none has addressed the question in any published report. Calling the campaign "AI training manipulation" goes beyond the evidence. "An attempt to influence chatbot answers through search and retrieval, with pages also exposed to training crawls" is what the documents and tests support.

Ten Clock Tower X sites and one Hanover site with a few hundred reports compare with Pravda's 3.6 million articles in a year. The Israeli sites are aimed at a narrow set of questions, and a page that ranks for a precise question can matter more to a retrieval system than volume does.

Earlier Israeli operations

Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs paid about $2 million for a covert campaign in 2023 and 2024 run by STOIC, a Tel Aviv political marketing firm, four current and former officials told the New York Times. The operation used hundreds of fake accounts on X, Facebook and Instagram, several fake news sites and ChatGPT-generated comments aimed at more than a dozen members of Congress, including Hakeem Jeffries, Raphael Warnock and Ritchie Torres. OpenAI identified the network as "Zero Zeno" in May 2024 and wrote that it "was operated by STOIC", used OpenAI's models "to generate web articles and social media comments" and attracted "little if any engagement" beyond its own fake accounts. Meta removed 510 Facebook accounts, 11 Pages, one Group and 32 Instagram accounts tied to STOIC and sent the firm a cease-and-desist letter. Google removed two YouTube channels. None of the three companies attributed the operation to the Israeli government. The ministry said it "does not engage in disinformation campaigns."

STOIC differs from the 2025 and 2026 contracts in the way that matters most legally: it used fake identities and was hidden, while Clock Tower X and Piro are registered and their material is labelled. The targets differ too. STOIC aimed at people through social media, and nothing in the record shows it tried to shape chatbot answers. No overlap of personnel between STOIC and the Havas contractors has been documented.

Concert, originally Kela Shlomo and later renamed Voices of Israel, was set up by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in 2017 with 128 million shekels in state funds to be matched by private donors.

Wikipedia has no documented Israeli government editing campaign. The Yesha Council, the settlers' umbrella body, ran an editing course in 2010 that Jimmy Wales said had "absolutely no impact". Wikipedia's arbitration committee sanctioned eight editors on the Israel-Palestine topic in January 2025 without finding state involvement on either side. The Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank, recommended in September 2026 that Israel open "professional dialogue with search engine and AI firms about labeling sensitive Wikipedia content." No such dialogue has been reported.

Meta reported in August 2026 a network of 215 Facebook accounts and 1,044 Instagram accounts "originating in Israel" that targeted audiences in France, the UK, Australia, Iran, several African countries and the United States, describing it as "influence-for-hire" run for several clients. Meta did not link it to the government. OpenAI reported on 25 August 2026 that a Russian operation had promoted an "International Burke Institute" that presented itself as based in Israel, a reminder that Israeli branding does not establish Israeli origin.

The companies

No AI company has published a threat report or statement naming Clock Tower X, Piro or Hanover. The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre asked OpenAI, Meta, YouTube, Havas and MarketBrew about Clock Tower X in November 2025; only TikTok replied. Perplexity told Drop Site that it "is built to give people cited, linked answers from a range of sources so they can go directly to the original reporting and reach their own conclusions." Microsoft and Google did not respond to Drop Site. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have not commented publicly on Hanover. None of the companies has said whether it has downgraded the domains, and no reporting has tested whether they did.

No public lobbying disclosure or FARA filing records Israeli government contact with an AI company about model content. Viral claims in December 2025 that Israel had signed a deal with OpenAI to produce pro-Israel content were rated misleading by the fact-checkers Snopes and Digiteye. OpenAI appears in the record only as the supplier whose models STOIC misused and which then shut that operation down.

Israel's documented dealings with Elon Musk, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are sometimes cited as evidence of influence over AI:

• Netanyahu discussed antisemitism on X with Musk in a livestreamed conversation on 18 September 2023. "I encourage you and urge you to find the balance. It's a tough one," he said. The exchange concerned platform moderation on X. Musk's chatbot Grok was suspended on X on 11 August 2025 after posting that Israel and the US were committing genocide in Gaza. "It was just a dumb error. Grok doesn't actually know why it was suspended," Musk said. Grok's later answers described war crimes as likely and genocide as "not proven". xAI has given no official cause, and no reporting has linked the episode to Israeli government contact.
• Google and Amazon hold Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract signed in 2021 with the Israeli government. Contract terms disclosed in October 2025 bar the companies from restricting Israel's access. Google said the idea that it would evade its legal obligations was "categorically wrong". Nimbus is a commercial cloud and AI services contract.
• Microsoft cut off some Azure storage and AI services to Israel's Unit 8200 in September 2025 after reporting that the unit used them to store intercepted Palestinian phone calls. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said: "We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians." It is the only documented case of a large AI or cloud company restricting Israeli government use, and it runs against the idea of capture.
• Google received about $45 million from Lapam in 2025 for YouTube and display advertising, a disclosed ad sale.

The Anti-Defamation League, a US organisation independent of the Israeli government, reported "anti-Israel bias" in GPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama in March 2025. Researchers at the universities of Zurich and Konstanz reported in November 2024 that ChatGPT gave casualty figures for Israeli airstrikes about a third higher in Arabic than in Hebrew. Neither study was commissioned by a government.

Disclosure and the law

FARA requires registered agents to label informational materials with a conspicuous statement that they are distributed on behalf of a foreign principal, and to file copies with the Justice Department. Clock Tower X and Piro appear to comply at the level of their websites: every Hanover page checked on 29 September 2026 and every Clock Tower X article in the filings examined carries the required statement, and both firms file material regularly. Clock Tower X's docket had 237 records by 25 September 2026, most of them informational materials.

A chatbot that summarises allyvia.org or Hanover does not carry the footer into its answer, and Drop Site found that Perplexity and Copilot cited the sites without mentioning Israeli funding. Nothing in FARA or platform rules requires an AI system to relay a source's foreign-agent disclosure. A reader who opened the cited page and scrolled to its footer could identify the Israeli government as the funder. A reader who saw only the chatbot's answer could not.

Hanover's footer disclaims "authorship or editorial control" on behalf of Piro, Havas and Lapam, while the site names no authors at all. Israel's foreign ministry said it "does not conduct influence operations in the US."

The Quincy Institute and Public Citizen asked the Justice Department on 12 November 2025 to act against US influencers who posted for the Esther Project without registering. A FARA specialist told Responsible Statecraft in February 2026 that "Friends for Peace" text messages sent by Clock Tower X contractors from November 2025 should have carried a "conspicuous statement" of Israeli government affiliation. No enforcement action against any of the registrants has been made public.

Meta's and OpenAI's coordinated inauthentic behaviour rules turn on deception about who is behind content. Registered, labelled sites fall outside them, which is one reason platform reports have named STOIC and not Clock Tower X. The EU regulation on the transparency of political advertising, most of which has applied since 10 October 2025, covers paid political advertising in the EU. The filed Clock Tower X and Piro campaigns target the United States. No AI transparency standard currently requires chatbots to flag state-funded sources.

Parscale said in July 2026, responding to Vice President JD Vance's claim of a "very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign" against US diplomacy: "Everything I created and did is publicly disclosed through the FARA process." He has made no public comment on the GPT line. Havas, Lapam, the Israeli embassy and Hanover did not respond.

Timeline

• 2017: The Ministry of Strategic Affairs sets up Kela Shlomo, later Concert, with 128 million shekels in state funds.
• October 2023 to 2024: STOIC runs a covert campaign for the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, costing about $2 million.
• 29 to 30 May 2024: Meta and OpenAI disclose the STOIC network. Its link to the ministry is reported on 5 June.
• 28 February 2025: SKDKnickerbocker registers under FARA. Its $600,000 contract includes a "bot-based program" that "floods the zone".
• May 2024: Parscale tells the Associated Press that Campaign Nucleus has expanded into Israel, India, Brazil and the Balkans.
• 10 March 2025: Fernando Cerimedo announces he is Latin American licensee for Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver.
• 16 June 2025: Bridges Partners' Esther Project contract begins, worth about $900,000.
• 17 June 2025: Lapam's $45 million Google advertising contract begins.
• 8 September 2025: Clock Tower X signs with Havas Media Germany. The statement of work includes the "GPT framing" line.
• 18 September 2025: Clock Tower X registers as foreign agent 7649.
• 26 to 27 September 2025: Bridges Partners and Show Faith by Works register. Netanyahu tells US influencers in New York: "You have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield, and one of the most important ones is social media."
• 29 September 2025: The GPT line becomes public.
• 23 November 2025: The Justorium Journal is filed as FARA material.
• 30 November 2025: Honduras votes. Parscale advised Nasry Asfura's campaign remotely.
• 26 December 2025: Clock Tower X files an amendment raising its contract from $6 million to $9 million.
• 7 January 2026: The list of Clock Tower X sites is published from FARA filings.
• 25 April 2026: Axios's ChatGPT test finds no citations of the sites.
• 30 April 2026: Piro's $900,000 work order is dated.
• 18 May 2026: Clock Tower X reports $15 million received to 31 March.
• 2 June 2026: Piro registers as foreign agent 7732. Clock Tower X's work order at $4.5 million a month from April to October is dated.
• 26 June 2026: The earliest dated Hanover report in the FARA docket.
• 13 July 2026: TIME quotes an Israeli official: "We are pissed at Brad Parscale."
• 22 July 2026: Hai Tran of Res registers as a Piro subcontractor.
• 28 July 2026: Drop Site News publishes its Common Crawl count and chatbot tests.
• 6 August 2026: Hanover launches publicly.
• 14 August 2026: Politico reports ChatGPT and Perplexity citing Hanover.
• 18 August 2026: Cerimedo is detained in Bolivia and later charged with attempted femicide.
• 19 to 26 August 2026: Cybernews, 404 Media and the Guardian report AI-written text, llms.txt and publication volume.
• 22 to 23 September 2026: Hanover publishes nine reports on the documentary NAZA.
• 25 September 2026: Latest Clock Tower X informational-materials filing.
• 30 September 2026: Nadia Beller publishes undated photographs of Cerimedo with Trump Jr. and Parscale.
• 31 October 2026: The current Clock Tower X work order expires.

The network

FARA filings document each link below unless it is marked as reported:

Clock Tower X's contract with Havas, the Israeli government's prime contractor, commits it to the "deployment of websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations", and the websites are online. Piro's contracts do not mention AI. Piro gave the Hanover site an llms.txt file and headlines phrased as chatbot questions, took on the founder of an AI-citation platform as a registered subcontractor, and its co-founder sells a service called "AI Story Optimization". No document names the chatbots the work was meant to reach.

Perplexity and Copilot cited Clock Tower X sites in Drop Site's tests, and ChatGPT and Perplexity cited Hanover in Politico's. The Wall Street Journal reported ChatGPT and Claude citing allyvia.org. Axios and Novara Media ran their own tests and found no citations. Common Crawl's captures of the sites are the only evidence that touches training data, alongside one unverified claim by Drop Site about Gemini and Copilot.

Israel's documented dealings with Google, Amazon and Microsoft are commercial contracts, and Microsoft cut off part of its service to Israel's military intelligence.

Hanoverinstitute.com and the 10 Clock Tower X domains have registration dates that have not been published. Drop Site has not published how it separated training data from live search. No AI company has said whether it detected, downgraded or labelled the domains. Clock Tower X's filings show $6 million received for January to March 2026 with no published contract covering those months, and no filing explains why a bundle of Clock Tower X material sits in Piro's FARA docket.