Islamabad (TDI): Israel spent $46.5 million on a digital campaign aimed at influencing how artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots respond to questions about the Gaza war, according to an investigative report published by Drop Site News.
The report said that Brad Parscale, former campaign manager for US President Donald Trump, and his firm Clock Tower X were awarded the contract by the Israeli government to build a network of websites promoting pro-Israel narratives.
According to the report, the campaign sought to influence AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity by publishing hundreds of articles on topics such as the Gaza war, Israel’s military operations and US-Israel relations.
The websites reportedly included Allyvia.org, FactSignal.org and Paxpoint.org, which published content supporting Israel’s military campaign, advocating closer US-Israel cooperation and challenging allegations regarding Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
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Drop Site News said the strategy relied on creating content that would be indexed by search engines and incorporated into AI training datasets, a technique it described as “LLM poisoning.”
Although the websites attracted limited human readership, the report said they were primarily intended to influence search engines and large language models rather than conventional audiences.
According to the report, some AI systems have already cited the websites. It said Perplexity referenced Allyvia.org in response to a question about US-Israel military cooperation, while Microsoft Copilot also cited websites linked to Clock Tower X.
The report further stated that material from the network had been included in Common Crawl, a widely used web archive that serves as a data source for training many AI models. It said the websites were crawled hundreds of times between January and June, potentially increasing their visibility in AI-generated responses.
Herve Letoqueux, chief executive of digital disinformation monitoring organization Check First, said Common Crawl is widely used in training large language models, making it a target for attempts to influence AI outputs.
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He said the moderate tone and sourced presentation of the websites could make them particularly effective because AI systems often present multiple viewpoints when responding to controversial topics.
The report also claimed that public support for Israel in the United States has declined significantly since the start of the Gaza war, including among some traditionally pro-Israel constituencies.
