Israel Pays $46.5M to Embed Pro-Israel Narratives Into AI Chatbots

Since October, Brad Parscale, former campaign manager for U.S. President Donald Trump, has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel through a firm called Clock Tower X. The operation is part of a $46.5 million（約74億円） contract with the Israeli government to influence artificial intelligence systems. One article published on the network's sites, 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 casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.

Although the websites average only a few hundred unique visitors each month, their true audience is not humans but artificial intelligence systems. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale explicitly stated he would deploy "websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations." His team has recently told Axios they are "seeing success" at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data. Clock Tower X created 10 separate websites, each dedicated to promoting a different Israeli narrative. Paxpoint.org fashions itself as promoting Israel as a nation of peace, FactSignal.org acts as a fact-checking website tackling anti-Israel information by discrediting slain journalists as Hamas terrorists and rejecting the notion that Israel's military actions in Gaza constitute a genocide, while Allyvia.org is dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Other sites include Cognitura.org (a research platform exploring extremist groups like Hamas), Justorium.org (arguing Israel's military actions follow international law), Culturavia.org (celebrating U.S.-Israel cultural ties), Compassionpulse.org (sharing stories of Israeli civilian protection), Econora.org (highlighting the U.S.-Israeli trade relationship), Innovascope.org (promoting U.S.-Israeli technology partnership), and Feedingyoufiction.com (claiming Gaza footage is staged).

All sites contain a mandatory Foreign Agents Registration Act disclosure stating "this material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel," yet when Drop Site asked prominent chatbots about the latest news from these sites, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot did not flag the disclosure. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini did flag it. The Clock Tower network began being archived by Common Crawl—a nonprofit managing a massive repository of data used to train large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—earlier in 2026. Common Crawl trains 80% of the tokens of OpenAI's GPT-3, making it a critical chokepoint for AI training data. Between January and June, a sample of the 10 sites was crawled by Common Crawl 912 times in total. Paxpoint.org was crawled 220 times, Allyvia.org 158 times, FactSignal.org 108 times, Cognitura.org 106 times, Justorium.org 93 times, Culturavia.org 76 times, Compassionpulse.org 57 times, Econora.org 49 times, Innovascope.org 45 times, and Feedingyourfiction.com just once. The crawling frequency increased dramatically over time: in January 2026, the sites were crawled only twice, but by May they were crawled 376 times, before a notable dip in June.

Disinformation researchers and AI experts point out that successful manipulation of AI training data requires far fewer documents than one might expect. An October 2024 Anthropic study found that it only takes about 250 malicious documents to produce a "backdoor" vulnerability in a large language model regardless of model size or training data volume. Hervé Letoqueux, Chief Executive Officer at Check First (an organization combating digital disinformation), told Drop Site that Common Crawl's status as the go-to source for training chatbots makes it a target for manipulation. When Drop Site tested five different chatbots—Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude AI, and Perplexity—the Parscale network consistently appeared in the training data of Gemini and Copilot, while Claude and ChatGPT did not appear to contain the websites in their training data, though they could still search Clock Tower X websites when responding to queries. Perplexity appeared to be trained on some of the Clock Tower X websites.

Parscale's team has credited their success partly to a softer approach. Scott Stouffer, Chief Technology Officer of Market Brew (a company specializing in influencing LLMs that Parscale invests in), told Axios that information written in a "factual tone and tightly organized" format is more likely to be cited in AI platforms. "What you can do is make sure that your information is structured, sourced, and aligned in a way that those systems are more likely to retrieve it when someone asks a question," Stouffer said. "It's less about changing the conversation and more about making sure your facts are eligible to be part of it." Many blog posts on the Clock Tower network contain at least a few sentences of nuance; for example, the FactSignal blog post about Gaza journalists states that "Distinguishing between legitimate reporters and militant operatives is not always simple, but accurate reporting requires careful investigation and transparency." The author of many posts is Israel-based digital marketer Mark Ginsberg, who registered as a foreign agent for Israel in March and advertises expertise in "Generative Engine Optimization"—or LLM grooming—on his LinkedIn profile. In a June article for The Times of Israel, Ginsberg argued that Israel should invest in influencing chatbots, writing that "Israel needs to invest seriously in the defense of truth…It means ensuring that accurate information appears not merely in government archives but in search results, educational resources, encyclopedias, social media feeds, podcasts, documentaries, and AI training datasets." Letoqueux confirmed that because chatbots prefer balanced presentations, websites offering the Israeli narrative as "one side of the debate" on questions like "Is Israel committing a genocide?" could be "quite useful at doing damage control."

The operation represents a deliberate effort to exploit how AI training systems work. Brad Parscale's Clock Tower X created a network of 10 websites, each with a specific narrative purpose—Paxpoint.org promoting Israel as a "nation of peace," FactSignal.org acting as a fact-checker to discredit Gaza journalists, Allyvia.org strengthening U.S.-Israel military ties—all marked with mandatory Foreign Agents Registration Act disclosures but still designed to influence AI systems. The contract amounts to $46.5 million（約74億円） in direct Israeli government spending on what researchers call "LLM poisoning."

The strategy is working partly because of how chatbots operate and what data sources they rely on. Common Crawl, which trains 80% of OpenAI's GPT-3 tokens, has been archiving the Clock Tower network since early 2026. An October Anthropic study found that only 250 malicious documents are needed to create a "backdoor" vulnerability in large language models regardless of model size or total training volume—meaning the 912 crawls of these 10 sites between January and June represent sufficient penetration to shape responses. Disinformation researchers note that because chatbots have a built-in preference for balanced presentations, Parscale's team deliberately wrote content in "factual tone and tightly organized" formats with "at least a few sentences of nuance," making the sites more palatable to AI systems than obvious propaganda.

The technical evidence shows uneven success: Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot consistently surface Clock Tower X websites in their responses and appear to have the network in their training data, while Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini either do not have the sites in training data or do not cite them in public queries. However, even partial success means millions of Americans using AI tools receive framed narratives without knowing they originated in a $46.5 million（約74億円） foreign influence campaign.

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