Copilot

The next time you ask an AI chatbot about the war in Gaza, the answer you get may have been quietly shaped by an Israeli government-funded operation, and there is no actual way of knowing. An investigation by Drop Site News has found that Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager for US President Donald Trump, has since October 2025 been running a covert operation on behalf of Israel aimed at influencing what artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot tell users about Israel and Gaza. The contract is worth USD 46.5 million in total and currently runs at USD 4.5 million a month. It has tripled from the USD 1.5 million a month Parscale first signed for. Brad Parscale of Clock Tower X. A network built for machines Parscale's firm, Clock Tower X, has created a network of 10 websites, each pushing a particular Israeli narrative. One presents Israel as a nation of peace. Another dismisses reports of journalists killed in Gaza as Hamas propaganda. A third claims Israeli forces go out of their way to protect civilians. One site even promotes the claim that footage coming out of Gaza is staged, while some content casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in 2024, according to Drop Site. These sites are not built to attract readers, with most drawing only a few hundred visitors a month. Their real target is AI. The goal, known in the industry as "LLM poisoning," is to get pro-Israel content absorbed into the data that trains and feeds AI chatbots, so the machines repeat it back to millions of users. Every site carries a legal line at the bottom stating it is distributed "on behalf of the State of Israel," as required under US law. But when chatbots cite these sites, they usually do not pass that disclosure on to the user. Is it working? According to the Drop Site investigation, it is working, at least partly. The 10 sites were picked up 912 times between January and June 2026 by Common Crawl, a repository whose data is used to train most major AI models. The pace has been rising sharply, with the sites crawling just twice in January, but 376 times in May. Tests found that Gemini and Copilot draw on the network's content, while some of it also appears in Perplexity's training data. Claude and ChatGPT did not appear to be trained on the sites, though they can still cite them when searching the web. When Drop Site asked Perplexity whether it was good for the US to boost military ties with Israel, the bot replied with a single word "Yes" and cited a Parscale-created site as its top source. Photo: Drop Site News Experts say the danger is real. One study cited in the report found that as few as 250 planted documents can compromise even a large AI model, regardless of its size. Why the 'soft' approach works Disinformation researchers say what makes this operation effective is its restraint. Unlike crude propaganda, the Clock Tower sites are written in a measured, well-sourced tone, with bullet points and neat summaries, which is exactly the kind of content AI systems are designed to trust and pull from. Analysts point out that the sites lean on opinions, half-truths and disputed claims rather than easily debunked lies, which makes them far harder for AI systems to filter out. "It's harder to put guardrails around opinion," a NewsGuard analyst told Drop Site. By comparison, while Russia's much larger propaganda network gets archived at a rate of about 2.5 per cent, an estimated 85 per cent of the Clock Tower network's pages have made it into Common Crawl. The network also shifts with Israel's priorities. As debate flared in the US over a Congressional measure deepening US-Israel military ties, the sites published a wave of posts framing it favourably. Photo: Drop Site News But Israel isn't happy Parscale is also said to be running a mass-texting campaign in the US under the guise of fake "peace" groups, such as one calling itself "Friends for Peace," which does not appear to exist as a registered organisation. The effort is part of a much bigger push, as Israel has spent well over USD 100 million on US lobbying since 2023. Yet, despite the money, Israel appears unhappy with the results. "We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse," one Israeli official told Time magazine.

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