An investigation published by Drop Site News has revealed that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale oversaw a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to build a network of pro-Israel websites and blog posts specifically designed to influence how major AI chatbots discuss the Gaza conflict.
The campaign, operated through Parscale's firm Clock Tower X, involved creating hundreds of websites and articles about Israel. According to the investigation, these sites were not primarily intended for human readers — their target audience was AI language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, which ingest vast amounts of web content during training and retrieval-augmented generation.
When Drop Site asked one major chatbot whether the United States should enhance military cooperation with Israel, the AI responded with a one-word answer: "Yes." The top source cited was a website created by Parscale's firm for the Israeli government.
The investigation represents a new dimension in information warfare: rather than targeting human audiences directly, the campaign aimed to shape the underlying information environment that AI systems draw from when generating responses. By flooding the web with one-sided content about the conflict, the operation sought to influence AI outputs at scale.
The technique exploits a fundamental characteristic of large language models: they reflect the distribution of information in their training data and retrieval sources. If a particular narrative dominates the accessible web, AI chatbots are statistically likely to reproduce it.
The findings raise urgent questions about the vulnerability of AI systems to coordinated information operations and the challenges of maintaining balanced, accurate outputs when the source data itself has been deliberately manipulated. AI companies have not yet responded to detailed questions about what safeguards, if any, exist to detect and counter such campaigns.
The investigation comes at a time when governments, advocacy groups, and political operatives worldwide are increasingly recognizing AI chatbots as a critical new battleground for shaping public opinion.
