A think tank published more than 100 reports and named not one author. The small print says the Israeli government paid for it.
The Hanover Institute for Public Policy has put out over 100 reports on Israel and Palestine since 6 August, none carrying a byline. A foreign-agent registration filing, first reported by Politico, shows it was set up by Piro, Inc. — co-founded by the film producer Daniel Rosenberg — on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, subcontracted through Havas Media, for $900,000. Responsible Statecraft ran twelve of the articles through the detection tool GPTZero; eleven came back as high-confidence machine-generated. The reports use a neutral tone, footnotes and data tables, and Piro's own website advertises a service it calls 'AI Story Optimization'.
Why it mattersSearch-engine optimisation was written for people who would eventually click. This is written for the model that summarises. A chatbot weighing which sources to trust has no way to see that a footnote-heavy, byline-free policy paper was produced by a machine and paid for by a government — the format is exactly what it has learned to read as institutional. The cheapest route to changing what AI tells millions of people may no longer be to argue with it, but to manufacture the material it reads, and here is a documented case of a state spending $900,000 to try.
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