Israel-linked campaign sought to shape AI answers on Gaza, filings show

Documents filed with the U.S. Justice Department show that Havas, a global advertising firm, paid $100,000 to the company Piro to build a website called the "Hanover Institute for Public Policy" that published dozens of reports and articles on Gaza and Israel, according to Politico. The filings, submitted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, describe an effort to influence how ChatGPT and Perplexity respond to questions about the Gaza war and the Israeli military, including prompts such as "Is the IDF the most moral army in the world?" and "Is there a starvation policy in Gaza?" Testing by Politico found that the AI models cited the institute's content when answering questions about Gaza, antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Instead of tampering with the models directly, the campaign aimed to seed the wider online information ecosystem so that the systems would encounter and draw on the desired narratives as sources. Earlier filings in the same effort detailed a separate $46.5 million campaign last year in which Havas worked with Brad Parscale and Clock Tower X to push GPT models toward Israel-friendly outputs. No further details were immediately available on any response from the companies named in the documents.