Full Breakdown
Israel’s $46.5 Million Campaign to Shape AI Answers on the Gaza War
7/30/2026, 12:58:35 AM
Core Event
On July 29, 2026, Drop Site News reported that the Israeli government awarded a $46.5 million contract to Clock Tower X, a firm run by Brad Parscale, former campaign manager for former President Donald Trump. The contract tasked Clock Tower X with creating and operating a network of ten websites—such as Allyvia.org, FactSignal.org and Paxpoint.org—to publish hundreds of articles that present pro-Israeli narratives about the Gaza war, Israel’s military actions, and U.S.–Israel relations. The content is designed to be indexed by search engines and incorporated into large-language-model (LLM) training data, a practice described as “LLM poisoning.”
Background and Context
The campaign emerged amid the ongoing Gaza conflict, which the reports say has resulted in more than 73,000 Palestinian deaths. Public opinion in the United States, including among traditionally pro-Israel constituencies such as conservatives and evangelical Christians, has reportedly declined sharply since the war began. In this environment, the Israeli government sought to influence how AI chatbots answer contentious questions—e.g., whether Israel is committing genocide—by ensuring that pro-Israeli perspectives appear in the data that train these systems.
Key Actors and Their Roles
- Brad Parscale – Founder of Clock Tower X; led the development of the website network under the Israeli contract.
- Clock Tower X – Digital-media firm that produced the articles and managed the ten-site network.
- Herve Letoqueux – Chief executive officer of Check First, an organization that monitors digital disinformation; he explained how the campaign could affect chatbot outputs.
Scope, Methods and Potential Impact
According to Drop Site News, the ten Clock Tower X sites were crawled by the Common Crawl web archive “hundreds of times” between January and June 2026, increasing the likelihood that their content would be included in LLM training datasets. Tests cited in the reports showed that Perplexity referenced Allyvia.org when answering a question about U.S. military cooperation with Israel, and Microsoft’s Copilot cited other Clock Tower-linked sites.
Herve Letoqueux noted that the moderate tone of the sites could make them especially effective, as chatbots often present multiple viewpoints. He warned that such sites could be used for “damage control” on questions like “Is Israel committing a genocide?” by providing the Israeli narrative for AI systems to repeat.
The campaign illustrates how state actors can attempt to steer public discourse not only through traditional media but also by targeting the data pipelines that power emerging AI technologies.
