Israel is Spending Millions to Manipulate AI Chatbots Like ChatGPT and Claude

The Israeli government has allocated $46.5 million to an operation led by former Donald Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale to systematically manipulate artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Executing the campaign through his boutique digital firm, Clock Tower X LLC, Parscale initially outlined plans to deploy "websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations" as part of a contract that recently expanded to $4.5 million per month, according to Drop Site.

The operation relies on a network of 10 primary websites that publish hundreds of tightly structured articles engineered specifically to groom large language models rather than to attract human web traffic.

Targeting AI Infrastructure

Rather than attempting to reach mainstream news readers, the network focuses on infiltrating Common Crawl, a non-profit web repository that supplies training data for approximately 80 percent of GPT-3 tokens and underpins major commercial AI tools.

Between January and June, Common Crawl indexed Clock Tower X websites 912 times, achieving an 85 percent archiving rate across its content pathways, significantly outstripping rival foreign influence operations.

By using structured formatting, explicit bullet points, and authoritative sources, the sites exploit natural algorithmic preferences designed to present balanced perspectives on controversial geopolitical subjects.

Algorithmic Penetration

Scott Stouffer, chief technology officer at AI optimization firm Market Brew, noted that content architecture dictates how models index content: "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."

Testing across major commercial models revealed that engines such as Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Perplexity repeatedly cite Parscale’s network without identifying the platform's financial ties to foreign government sponsorship.

While mandatory Foreign Agents Registration Act disclosures appear at the foot of each site, prominent conversational AI outputs routinely fail to relay this background context to end-users querying the platforms.

Strategic Backlash

The initiative forms part of a broader expansion of foreign lobbying by Israel, which is projected to become the largest single spender under FARA in 2026 after investing over $100 million since 2023.

Despite substantial capital deployment, internal frustration in Tel Aviv over the overall return on investment has begun to surface.

An Israeli official familiar with the contract expressed dissatisfaction with the initiative’s public relations outcomes, stating, "We pissed at Brad Parscale. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse."