Israeli Government Paid $900K for a Fake Think Tank Built to Poison LLM Answers — 100+ Bylineless Articles Since Aug 6, 11 of 12 Flagged AI-Written

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Responsible Statecraft reported Aug 17 that the 'Hanover Institute for Public Policy' is a front created by Piro, Inc. (co-founded by Spike Lee producer Daniel Rosenberg) under a $900,000 contract from the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, subcontracted through Havas Media. Piro's own site markets the practice as 'AI Story Optimization' — content 'engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility' — and GPTZero flagged 11 of 12 sampled articles as AI-written with high confidence. It topped HN at 761 points and 435 comments; the builder takeaway is that retrieval-augmented answers now have a paid supply-chain attack surface aimed at Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity specifically.