Israel funded an institute that doesn't exist. Its 124 studies for chatbots have already ended up in archives for model training

A website posing as an American think-tank published 124 reports and over 560,000 words about Gaza in nine days — and according to The Guardian's analysis, it was not written solely for human readers. The website ran on a commercial platform that promises to modify content so that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini cite it. According to The Guardian, Hanover Institute for Public Policy does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no address, and none of its reports have a listed author. The New York-based firm Piro Inc registered the website this month with the U.S. Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as material it distributes for the Israeli government. The Guardian ↗

Headings are questions someone would type into a chatbot

Of the 124 headings on the site, all but one began with a question in the form a user would type into a chatbot — "Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?", "Did Israel expel Palestinians from their land?", "Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?". The reports appeared academic and were consistently sourced: they cited the World Bank, UN agencies, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Amnesty International, and the text of the Genocide Convention. The Guardian ↗

"It managed to disguise itself as something very academic — the website design, logos, everything looks good. But the more you read, the more you realize that much of it doesn't make sense," Nick Cleveland-Stout from Washington's Quincy Institute told The Guardian. Responsible Statecraft ↗

The key clue was technical. The website originally carried a file with which websites tell language models what they contain and how to read them. But it didn't describe Hanover Institute at all — it was the standard file from the Res platform, which describes itself as a tool helping companies get ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini to cite them. The industry calls this service generative engine optimization. The Guardian archived the file on August 13; since then it has been replaced with a customized version and the name Res has disappeared from the website. The founder of the Res platform, Hai Tran, registered with the U.S. Department of Justice on July 22 as a subcontractor to Piro on the Israeli contract in the role of "digital strategist". The Guardian ↗

The fingerprint that revealed the campaign

The framing was consistent and measurable. Where human rights organizations concluded that Israel was committing genocide or apartheid, the reports reliably added that no court had decided the allegations — The Guardian counted this formulation in 20 of the 124 reports. Data on victims and aid were attributed to "the disputing parties," with this caveat applied equally in 55 reports to Israeli figures as to Palestinian ones. This leaves the reader with the impression that almost nothing can be determined about Gaza. The Guardian ↗

But the most striking repeated pattern is a single study. An analysis of antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of British, French, and German media from 2022 is cited 454 times in the texts and appears in 88 of the 124 reports — including on topics with which it has nothing in common, such as land registry on occupied territories, the influence of the AIPAC lobbying organization on American courts, the number of casualties in Gaza, or the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. "Almost every article ends with the notion that merely talking about this could contribute to antisemitism," Cleveland-Stout described the pattern. "And then it appends this study about Facebook comments in Britain." The Guardian ↗

Risks are not just answers, but also training data

Cleveland-Stout warns that the threat is not a user who clicks through to the website. "There are basically two ways," he explained. The first is to publish websites and hope that chatbots will cite them. The second he called more concerning and probably more effective — to get material into repositories like Common Crawl, from which training data for commercial models are taken. "When the model retells the narrative it was trained on, it won't even cite the sources," he added. "You won't be able to verify it." The Guardian ↗

An older part of the same network has already gone down that path. Seven pages of Clock Tower X, headed by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, appeared 294 times in the July Common Crawl index. According to The Guardian, Hanover Institute was not in it yet; its reports came out after that index was closed. The newspaper therefore wrote that the institute is at the beginning of the same route. The Guardian ↗

In the meantime, it has gone through it. Hotinfo directly queried the public Common Crawl index and while the July index has no record for the hanoverinstitute.com domain, the August one contains 123. All come from a single night of August 13, from a time range between 02:12 and 03:49, and thirty of them are direct pages with individual reports from the institute — that is, the texts that The Guardian analyzed. Common Crawl ↗

At the foot of each page of the institute, however, stood a foreign agent disclosure. Cleveland-Stout submitted this objection to the Perplexity chatbot and it responded that users can view the page and assess credibility themselves. "But how many people actually do it?" the researcher commented. Arab News ↗

Europe knows the same technique from a Russian network

The mechanism is not new, what is new is the sender. The Moscow network Pravda produced approximately 3.6 million articles in 2024 with a single goal — to flood search engines and web crawlers so that they would be reflected in the responses of language models. An audit by NewsGuard found that ten leading generative AI tools repeated false claims from this network in 33 percent of cases. The technique gained a name introduced by American nonprofit American Sunlight Project: LLM grooming. NewsGuard ↗

The difference is that the Russian network conceals its origin, while the Israeli campaign has at the foot of each page a legally required disclosure and proper filing with the U.S. Department of Justice. It is legal and acknowledged — and precisely for that reason it cannot be dismissed as disinformation. "Whether it's foreign governments, companies, or just a guy who owns an ice cream shop — LLM grooming, poisoning, call it whatever you want, it's part of the new reality we live in," Cleveland-Stout summed it up. The Guardian ↗

Slovak media wrote about the campaign, just with a different number

The campaign is not completely new for the Slovak reader. SME wrote about it on August 23 based on Politico magazine and startitup.sk two days later Startitup ↗, with both reports working with a sum of one hundred thousand dollars. However, that figure related to one part of the campaign, not the entire budget — and neither of them mentioned Hanover Institute, Piro or Havas and did not describe how such content for machines is prepared. SME ↗

The Guardian added a broader financial framework. Piro alone has, according to foreign agent filings, a contract for one million dollars divided into two orders — so it's not the budget of Hanover Institute, but the compensation of one supplier. Still, it's only a fraction of the campaign it's part of. According to Department of Justice documents, Havas Media Germany paid Clock Tower X 15 million dollars in six installments between October 24, 2025 and March 3, 2026 and Targeted Communications Global 9,892,335 dollars between October and December 2025. Havas figures as an intermediary in the registrations of five American companies. The Guardian ↗

More interesting than the amounts is the timing. Seven days after the first of those payments, October 31, 2025, Havas's American subsidiary ended its own registration as an agent of the Israeli government. While it had it, it had to report what it received — for the six months before the end of October 2023, it was 2,951,745 dollars from the German sister company to an Israeli account. Since the German entity pays American suppliers directly, Havas reports nothing, because a foreign principal has no obligation to file reports. The entire campaign thus disappeared from public records and only scattered filings of individual suppliers remain from it. The Guardian ↗

Limits of This View

It is the findings of one editorial team. The Guardian contacted Piro Inc, Havas Media, and the Israeli government advertising agency LaPam and also wrote to the contact address published on the institute's website — no one responded to these questions. The positions of both main actors are thus older. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied that it conducted "influence operations" in the United States and stated that it strictly adheres to American law. Piro's co-founder Daniel Rosenberg stated that the firm was hired to "introduce accurate and sourced facts into the public sphere" and counter misinformation about Israel with verifiable information. The Guardian ↗

The second objection is more fundamental and comes from Israel. According to the Guardian, Israeli officials told Ynet newspaper in July that the campaign failed — one of them stated that the government "paid a lot of money, but the situation only got worse". The budget for this public diplomacy was allocated by Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar — 181.6 million dollars upon taking office and later an additional 666.3 million for the years 2026 and 2027. A former high-ranking Israeli public diplomacy official called the campaign a "terrible fraud of Pollard scale" — a reference to Jonathan Pollard, an American analyst convicted in 1987 for spying for Israel. Ynet ↗ These doubts fit into the trend of polls. Gallup measured in February that Israelis for the first time since 2001 do not have an edge in American sympathies — 41 percent of respondents mentioned Palestinians and 36 percent mentioned Israelis, although Gallup itself notes that a five-point difference is not statistically significant. Gallup ↗

A Pew survey in April showed 60 percent of Americans with unfavorable views of Israel, an increase of nearly 20 points since 2022, with young people shifting most dramatically. Pew Research Center ↗ An AP-NORC survey released July 7 found that 31 percent of Americans consider Israeli military operations in Gaza to be genocide, among Democrats 52 percent. AP-NORC ↗

Cleveland-Stout concludes from this that the campaign works precisely on what doesn't matter to Israel. "Parscale has success in influencing chatbots and Hanover Institute will have success in influencing chatbot responses too," he said. "But they don't change polls, and that's what actually matters to Israel." A political problem, he added, is being treated here as a marketing problem. The Guardian ↗

What hotinfo is Monitoring

Illustration: lobby of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem. Photo by Daryag, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.