Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working.
Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.
NICK CLEVELAND-STOUT JUL 28 GUEST POST. Drop Site News
Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another castsdoubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.
The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.
Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.
And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millionsof Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.
Read the article here.
Target Practice. Artificial intelligence systems—now an integral part of the Israeli war machine—began as tools developed to surveil every aspect of Palestinian life
By Sophia Goodfriend
In April 2024 international news sources circulated a video of a talk delivered by a senior Israeli military official during a tech conference at Tel Aviv University about a year earlier. The speaker, whose face is not shown, introduces himself only as “Colonel Yoav,” the head of data science and AI for Unit 8200, an elite outfit within Israel’s intelligence directorate. He is there to talk about the force’s embrace of artificial intelligence for the purposes of, as one slide in his presentation puts it, “finding new terrorists.”
During Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza, Colonel Yoav explains, his unit had used AI to generate two hundred targets, a process that in the past would have taken “almost a year.” In comparison, he suggests, the algorithm could identify likely members of militant organizations in practically no time: “Let’s say we have some terrorists that form a group, and we know only some of them. By practicing our data science magic powder we are able to find the rest.”
When Israel again began bombing Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023—commencing a war on the Strip that leading experts and human rights organizations have termed a genocide—it used AI to increase its surveillance and killing capacity. In lengthy exposés published in the Israeli/Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine, the journalist Yuval Abraham identified two separate machine-learning algorithms that were churning out lists of people or places to bomb, enabling the Israeli air force to strike targets at an unprecedented speed and scale. The first, called Habsora, or “The Gospel,” offered up locations that were supposedly linked to militant groups or their members, though sources told Abraham that the majority of its suggestions were private residences. The second, called Lavender, made “kill lists” of individual people, assigning scores that approximated how likely they were to belong to a militant group. Intelligence officers told Abraham that, at the start of the war, the military established that operatives could subject Lavender’s recommendations to only the barest scrutiny, even though it had been determined that the program made errors in around 10 percent of cases, sometimes suggesting targets with no Hamas affiliation. “I would invest twenty seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day,” one officer said. “I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval.”
Read the article from the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS here. It was reprinted from Portside.
The Eighth Front: Inside Israel’s $1 Billion Influence Campaign - Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Nick Cleveland-Stout
Posted on July 24, 2026
Executive Summary
The Israeli government has spent more than $1 billion in direct expenditures on public diplomacy since the Hamas–led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, a dramatic escalation in such spending. This represents Israel’s new reliance on influence operations in the United States, funded directly by the country’s government and subject to American laws on foreign influence.
For most of the US–Israel relationship’s history, Israel garnered unrivaled influence in US politics through an informal lobby made up of American citizens and organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, as well as individual mega-donors. These organizations are not required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, because they are funded by Americans and nominally act independently of the Israeli government. This system gave Israel enormous influence without triggering the disclosure requirements for direct foreign lobbying.
The deep unpopularity of Israel’s post–Oct. 7 military offensives among the American public spurred Israel to reassess the scope and structure of its influence operations. The Israeli government subsequently reinvented its public relations strategy by hiring registered foreign agents directly so that it could control messaging, target specific demographics, and act with speed and precision. Since 2023, Israel has spent over $100 million on influence in the US under FARA.
This paper uses FARA data, Israeli government procurement documents, and interviews with dozens of sources to trace the size and effects of this shift. Israel’s FARA spending is set to triple from 2024 to 2026, and the country is on track to become the single biggest FARA spender this year. Much of this work flows through the French firm Havas Media, which subcontracts with American firms that specialize in reaching the once most reliable sources of support that Israel is now losing: Evangelicals, conservatives, and young Americans. The tactics are new in kind, not just scale: paying influencers directly, funding a mass texting operation, and, the most novel of these new approaches, hiring firms like Clock Tower X to build networks of websites designed to shape how artificial intelligence chatbots characterize Israel.
This shift toward FARA–registrable engagement creates a new paper trail. But significant gaps in compliance and transparency remain: Organizations conducting clear lobbying activities have failed to register as lobbyists, some new firms working for Israel have openly flouted transparency requirements, and paid influencers have not disclosed their financial relationships with the Israeli government.
Israel’s new tactics are transforming America’s influence landscape, but they have so far proved insufficient to counter the erosion in public support that is being driven by Israel’s deeply unpopular policies. That said, Israeli influence operations have a commanding record of shaping American public opinion, and the infrastructure that Israel is now building is unlike anything previously deployed — it should not be underestimated.