Fake Think Tank Funded by Israel Published 500,000 Words to Influence AI Chatbots, Guardian Reports

The site uses the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which exists nowhere as a legal entity, has no physical address, no named staff and no bylines. It presents Israel’s positions on subjects such as the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza, all framed as neutral research. Its terms of use say they are governed by the laws of “the state in which the Institute is established,” without naming that state.

The Guardian’s analysis found that between 6 and 14 August, the Hanover Institute published 124 reports averaging about 4,500 words each. On 12 and 13 August alone, it produced 73 reports totaling almost 354,000 words. Nothing has been published since the first reports about the site on 14 August.

All but one of the 124 headlines begin with a question resembling what a user might type into a chatbot, including “Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?”, “Did Israel Expel Palestinians From Their Land?” and “Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?”. The articles are quasi-academic and carefully sourced, citing the World Bank, UN agencies, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Amnesty International and the Genocide Convention.

The New York media production company Piro Inc registered the site with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara), a 1938 law requiring anyone working for a foreign government to disclose it. The site is part of a broader campaign financed by tens of millions of dollars from the Israeli government and routed through third parties including the European advertising group Havas Media. A contract between Havas and another American company working on the campaign commits to “the deployment of websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations”.

Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate at the Quincy Institute who has examined the site, told the Guardian that his first impression was that “it succeeds in masquerading as very academic – the website design, the logos, everything just looks good. But the more you read it, you’re able to realise that a lot of it makes no sense.” The site persistently frames material to blunt criticism of Israel: where human rights organisations have concluded that Israel is committing genocide or apartheid, the reports say no court has ruled on the claim, a phrase used in 20 of 124 reports. Casualty and aid figures are attributed to “a party to the events,” a caveat in 55 reports, applied to Israeli and Palestinian statistics alike.

One 2022 study of antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of British, French and German media outlets is cited 454 times across 88 reports, including on unrelated topics such as land registration in occupied territories, Aipac’s influence on US media, the Gaza death toll and the 1948 expulsions. Cleveland-Stout noted the cumulative effect: “Almost every article concludes with saying, well, just talking about this though could contribute to antisemitism.”

The site initially contained an llms.txt file, which tells AI systems what a site contains and how to read it, but it did not describe the Hanover Institute. After the first reports, the institute added a page headed “funding” which says: “An earlier version of this page said the Institute operated without external funding, and that was true when it was written.”

The report comes as Israel’s standing in US public opinion has collapsed and Israeli officials have begun telling media that money spent on “Hasbara” overseas public diplomacy has been wasted.