Israel spent tens of millions of dollars on a digital influence campaign aimed at shaping how artificial intelligence systems respond to questions about the Gaza war, according to a report published on Tuesday by Drop Site News.
The report alleges that Brad Parscale, US President Donald Trump's former campaign manager, and his firm, Clock Tower X, built a network of websites under a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to promote pro-Israel narratives and influence AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
According to documents cited by Drop Site, Clock Tower X published hundreds of articles across multiple websites covering the war in Gaza, Israel's military operations and US-Israel relations.
The campaign seeks to influence responses
The report said the campaign sought to influence responses generated by large language models (LLMs) by creating content designed to be indexed by search engines and incorporated into AI systems, a practice sometimes referred to as "LLM poisoning."
Although the websites attracted little direct traffic, the report said they were intended to be indexed by search engines and scraped by AI training datasets.
It said websites including Allyvia.org, FactSignal.org and Paxpoint.org promoted closer US-Israel military cooperation, defended Israel's genocide in Gaza, challenged allegations over its conduct and presented pro-Israel perspectives.
According to the report, some AI systems have already cited the websites. In one test, Perplexity referenced Allyvia.org in response to a question about US military cooperation with Israel, while Microsoft's Copilot also cited websites linked to Clock Tower X.
Content enters AI training datasets
Drop Site also reported that content from the network had entered AI training datasets through Common Crawl, a widely used web archive for training large language models.
According to the report, the 10 websites linked to Clock Tower X were crawled by Common Crawl hundreds of times between January and June, potentially increasing their visibility in AI-generated responses.
Herve Letoqueux, chief executive officer of Check First, an organisation that combats digital disinformation, said Common Crawl is widely used to train large language models, making it a target for actors seeking to influence AI outputs.
"Common Crawl is widely used in the world of data science for training LLMs, which also means that actors want to manipulate the answers in their favour, which some studies have indicated are fairly easy to do," he said.
Altering search results
After reviewing the Clock Tower websites, Letoqueux said their moderate tone and reliance on sourced material could make them effective because chatbots often present multiple viewpoints.
"These websites could probably be quite useful at doing damage control on questions such as 'Is Israel committing a genocide?' because they provide the Israeli narrative, which chatbots can then repeat as representative of one side of the debate," he said.
The report said public support for Israel in the United States has declined sharply since the start of the Gaza war, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians. The decline has also been seen among groups traditionally considered strong supporters of Israel, including conservatives and evangelical Christians.
