Israel paid former Donald Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s digital influence firm $46.5 million to build a network of websites aimed at shaping how artificial intelligence chatbots respond to questions about the Gaza genocide, according to an investigation published by an independent news site.
The report said that Parscale’s company, Clock Tower X, created at least 10 websites promoting Israeli government narratives on issues ranging from the Gaza genocide to US-Israel relations. Rather than targeting large human audiences, the sites were reportedly designed to influence large language models (LLMs), the artificial intelligence systems that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity.
According to the investigation, Parscale’s original agreement with Israel stated that the company would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations”. Clock Tower X later told Axios it was “seeing success” in getting artificial intelligence systems to incorporate information from its websites, although it did not provide supporting data.
The news outlet revealed that several chatbots cited Clock Tower X websites when responding to questions about Israel, Gaza and the US-Israel relationship. It reported that Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot did not identify the sites as material produced on behalf of the Israeli government, while ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini did disclose that context in their responses.
Each website carries a disclaimer stating that its content is distributed by Clock Tower X on behalf of the State of Israel, as required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a US law requiring individuals and organisations representing foreign governments to disclose that relationship.
The investigation also said the websites had increasingly been archived by Common Crawl, a non-profit organisation whose publicly available web archive is widely used to help train artificial intelligence models. Between January and June, the 10 websites were reportedly crawled 912 times.
According to the report, Israel has expanded its lobbying efforts in the United States since 2023 and increased its contract with Parscale from $1.5 million to $4.5 million per month.
