Israel Contracts Firm for AI Content Campaign

According to Responsible Statecraft, Foreign Agents Registration Act filings describe Clock Tower's assignment as helping "execute a nationwide campaign in the United States to combat antisemitism." The filing did not specify the messages to be promoted. The New Arab likewise reported that public contracts did not detail the content to be promoted on Israel's behalf.

Both outlets reported that the work includes use of MarketBrew AI, a search-engine optimization platform. Responsible Statecraft characterized the intended use as improving the visibility and ranking of relevant narratives in search engines, while The New Arab reported that the tool could help clients adapt content for algorithmic ranking.

An Anadolu Agency report published July 29, 2026, citing Drop Site News and contract documents, described a larger reported $46.5 million Israeli government campaign involving Clock Tower X. Anadolu reported that the effort produced hundreds of articles across multiple sites and named Allyvia.org, FactSignal.org, and Paxpoint.org among sites promoting pro-Israel perspectives. The report did not establish that the $46.5 million arrangement and the previously reported $6 million contract are the same agreement.

The available reporting describes an attempt to influence chatbot outputs through web publishing, search indexing, and potential inclusion in web datasets. It does not demonstrate that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, or Perplexity changed a model's training data, ranking systems, or product behavior in response to the campaign.

Anadolu, again citing Drop Site, reported that some linked sites had been referenced in responses from Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, and that the sites had entered Common Crawl, a public web archive commonly used in language-model data pipelines. Common Crawl inclusion alone does not establish that any particular model was trained on the pages, nor does it establish their weight in a training corpus.

For ML practitioners, the distinction matters. Retrieval-augmented and web-search-enabled systems can surface recently indexed material more quickly than a model's underlying parameters change. Across the industry, attempts to shape web-scale corpora and search results reinforce the value of provenance signals, source-quality controls, adversarial evaluation, and citation inspection for politically sensitive queries.

Haaretz disinformation and cyber correspondent Omer Benjakob, speaking on a Haaretz podcast published in April 2026, described the sites as designed to resemble research institutes and think tanks and to optimize visibility for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other chatbots. He questioned the campaign's efficacy and value. The reporting reviewed here does not provide independent measurements of its impact on answers from those systems.