Between 6 and 14 August 2026, an institute for which the Guardian found no legal existence, with no address, no named staff and not a single signing author, published 124 reports of academic appearance on Gaza, starvation, genocide and antisemitism, more than 560,000 words in nine days. AI-text detectors, applied to a sample, flag automated writing. The papers that American law obliges its filers to submit describe the chain of command, which starts at the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam), passes through the German subsidiary of Havas, a French advertising group of which Bolloré entities control roughly half the capital, and ends at a small New York production company called Piro. Their readers are above all the machines that answer in the reader’s place, ChatGPT, Perplexity and their equivalents. Israel denies running influence operations in the United States.
An institute with no address and no authors
The Hanover Institute for Public Policy presents itself as a think tank, an institution that produces research to guide public debate. Its website says it studies “the inputs that feed antisemitism in the United States” and that its reports take no position. All of them deal with Israel and Palestine, almost all are titled with a question and none is signed.
The site explains the omission. “The researchers are not named because a finding should stand or fall on its sources rather than on the standing of whoever assembled it, and because the subject attracts harassment,” says its About page, as 404 Media reports. The same page traces the origin of the work to an anecdote from the founder about a Holocaust survivor, impossible to verify since nobody signs it.
Alice Lee, an analyst at NewsGuard, described the site as an imitation of “a typical credible American think tank, down to the generic name, the page design and the red, white and blue palette”. Its terms of use refer to “the state in which the Institute is established” without saying which.
This material is distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH, acting on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). The disclosure identifies the contractual relationship between the parties and does not indicate authorship or editorial control. (Footer of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy reports, own translation)
Hanover does not hide its funder, it deposits it in the footer, where whoever scrolls to the very end will find it.
A chain of subcontractors running through Havas
In the United States, a 1938 law known by its acronym, FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act), requires anyone working for a foreign government to declare it to the Department of Justice and to label the material distributed on its behalf. Piro, Inc., a New York production company co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, registered on 2 June 2026 under number 7732 and has since filed the Hanover reports. The principal named in its contractual exhibit is not the Israeli state directly. It is “Havas Media Germany GmbH on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam)”.
Two invoices from Havas to Piro appear in the file, $900,000 on 30 April 2026 and $100,000 on 20 June for two months of work, one million dollars across two work orders according to the Guardian. Nothing establishes what share financed Hanover. Politico links the first reports to $100,000 earmarked for distributing “accurate, well-sourced and accessible” content on the subjects the client and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs would set.
The contract between Piro and Havas Media Germany, dated 30 April 2026, totals $900,000 split between strategy (190,000), production oversight (80,000), production costs (400,000), distribution advice (95,000), media consulting (35,000) and analytics (100,000). (FARA registration 7732, exhibit AB)
Piro is not the only subcontractor. According to the Guardian, the German subsidiary of Havas paid $15 million to Clock Tower X, the firm of Brad Parscale, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, in six instalments between October 2025 and March 2026, and about $9.9 million to Targeted Communications Global between October and December 2025. Nearly $25 million to two American firms in five months. The newspaper found no public award covering that period, and the earlier ones, granted by LaPam to Havas entities, added up to contracts of $39 million, $29 million and $17.5 million and one of $58.3 million in 2023.
According to Havas’s press release of 20 February 2026, Bolloré SE holds 30.4 per cent of the capital and the Compagnie de l’Étoile des Mers, controlled by Bolloré Participations, about 19 per cent, plus the 2.9 per cent that its chairman, Yannick Bolloré, is transferring to that same company, so that once the transfer is complete the group’s entities stand close to half. No document consulted ties that family to the writing of the reports, and the footer states that Havas Media Germany exercises no editorial control. The documented link is one of ownership. Ownership does not prove intent, but it says who owns the intermediary that invoices.
Piro, the registrant, does not sign a single text. Havas, LaPam, the Israeli embassy and Hanover did not respond to Politico or to the Guardian. Rosenberg told Politico that his firm was hired “to counter disinformation about Israel with verifiable information”. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that the state does not conduct influence operations in the United States.
Writing to be quoted
Almost all the headlines are questions, the kind a user types into a chatbot. “Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?”, “Is there a policy of starvation in Gaza?”, “Is the Israeli army the most moral in the world?”. The report on the alleged starvation policy, dated 12 August, shows the mould. It opens with a block of bulleted key findings, repeats the question in every subheading and closes with a set of frequently asked questions in which each question imitates a user’s and each answer is brief, self-contained and ready to be copied. It cites real sources, United Nations bodies, Amnesty International, the Israeli army itself, without linking any, and points on every page to other reports from the same institute.
A model looking for sources finds a text already cut into answers, and if it looks for a second source to cross-check, the network of internal links may lead it back to the same institute.
The content is not what its cover story would announce. The report accepts the famine classification that the international food security measure, the IPC, issued in August 2025, accepts that five bodies, among them Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, spoke of hunger used as a method of war, and concludes that no court has ruled. None of this is false. The text moves the yardstick to a judgment that does not exist, and from there every finding is reduced to the claim of one party. According to the Guardian, 20 of the 124 reports recall that no court has delivered a verdict on the accusations of genocide or apartheid, and 55 present casualty and aid figures as coming from “a party to the events”, a formula applied as much to Israeli figures as to Palestinian ones. A 2022 study of antisemitic comments on Facebook is cited 454 times across 88 reports, and Nick Cleveland-Stout of the Quincy Institute observes that the repetition ties the debate on Israeli policy to antisemitism.
There is also a technical signal. A file called llms.txt, placed at the root of a site so that language models can read it more easily, first appeared on the Hanover site and belonged to Res, an American platform that sells what the industry calls generative engine optimisation, meaning content designed so that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini will cite it. After Politico’s enquiry, mentions of Res vanished. Its director, Hai Tran, replied that his role is recorded in the Department of Justice filing. Piro sells a service it calls AI Story Optimization. “Every day, more buying journeys begin with an AI conversation instead of a Google search. If the models don’t understand your story, they’ll tell someone else’s,” Rosenberg writes on LinkedIn, according to 404 Media.
In Piro’s papers the words artificial intelligence, chatbot and search engine do not appear. That Hanover was designed for machines is established by the format, the Res file, the text analyses and the commercial catalogue of its own contractor, not by a clause. Pangram concluded that three reports analysed by 404 Media were written entirely by AI, bibliography excepted, and GPTZero flagged eleven of twelve reports picked at random by Responsible Statecraft with high confidence. A sample does not prove that all 124 are. On another front the clause exists. According to the FARA records cited by Responsible Statecraft and the journalist Jack Poulson, the contract that Havas Media Germany signed on 8 September 2025 with Clock Tower X commits to the “deployment of websites and content to produce GPT framing results in GPT conversations”. What Hanover does without a clause, Clock Tower X does with one.
An answer nobody signs
Politico tested ChatGPT and Perplexity on 14 August with neutral questions about Gaza, anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and both cited Hanover material several times. The Guardian obtained from ChatGPT four links to reports from the institute, accompanied by a warning about the controversy over its funding. A citation is not training, and none of the published tests I could consult shows that the models’ answers have changed.
The reassuring argument stops there, and it is fragile. Hanover did not need to convince anyone in nine days, it needed to exist. The July index of Common Crawl, the public archive of web pages that serves as raw material for training many models, does not include it because the reports were published after its cut-off, according to the Guardian. What happens with later crawls is not documented, and the institute remains there, indexable.
The cost is what alarms. One million dollars at most, according to the documents, bought a library of 560,000 words with footnotes, and such a library can be replicated, translated and multiplied at the price of a subscription to a language model.
The motive appears in no document, and the reading is mine. On 27 February 2026, Gallup reported that, for the first time since 2001, Americans who sympathise more with the Palestinians, 41 per cent, outnumber those who sympathise more with the Israelis, 36 per cent, although the gap lies within the margin of error. Republicans remain on Israel’s side by 70 to 13. A state whose main military ally is the United States sees the base of that alliance eroding and buys what one buys in 2026 when opinion shifts, a place in the machine’s answer.
Hanover is the case that was discovered, not the only one, since, according to the FARA records, Clock Tower X preceded it, and it will not be the last, because its mechanisms are within reach of any communications firm with a subscription to a language model. What is disturbing is not that a chatbot should come to say that Israel is kind and never did anything wrong, because that gets detected. What is disturbing is a sober, footnoted answer that concedes the facts and reduces every accusation to the claim of one party, and that its reader takes for neutrality itself. Nobody signs it, everything is cited, and the one piece of information that would allow it to be weighed, the name of whoever paid, sits at the bottom, where no rule I am aware of obliges an answer to reproduce it…
G.S.
Sources
- FARA registration 7732 of Piro, Inc., exhibit AB, 30 April 2026
- Hanover Institute for Public Policy, Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza (12 August 2026)
- 404 Media, Israel Is Running a Synthetic Think Tank to Influence AI Search Results (25 August 2026)
- Politico Influence, Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions (14 August 2026)
- Ynetnews, 124 reports in nine days, detailed relay of the Guardian investigation
- Helsinki Times, Israel-backed website seeks to shape AI chatbot answers
- TRT World, Fake US think tank funded by Israel sought to influence AI chatbots
- Responsible Statecraft, Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
- Quincy Institute, Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza
- Jack Poulson, Israel expanded propaganda contract with Trump’s former campaign manager
- Cybernews, Ghost think tank suspected of fabricating news about Israel and Palestine to manipulate AI
- Havas NV, press release of 20 February 2026 on the shareholding of Compagnie de l’Étoile des Mers
- Al Jazeera, American support for Israel at historic low according to Gallup (27 February 2026)
- Gallup, Middle East
