Trump alum helps Israel mount AI influence campaign
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Israel has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign — spearheaded by a former top lieutenant of President Trump — to reshape how AI platforms portray the nation.
Why it matters: Platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are increasingly central to shaping perceptions — and countries, corporations and other powerful interests are spending big to influence them.
Zoom in: Israel last September hired Republican digital strategist Brad Parscale, who served as Trump's 2020 campaign manager, to oversee a pro-Israel social media campaign.
- At the time, pro-Israel figures were warning that the country was losing the social media war.
- That included AI platforms, which — as Parscale saw it — were predominantly drawing on anti-Israel information that fueled negative sentiment about the country.
- So Parscale's team embarked on a project aimed at getting AI systems to portray Israel in a more favorable light.
How it works: Market Brew, an online search and AI modeling company that Parscale's firm invests in, got to work on injecting Israel-friendly content into the online bloodstream. The goal: To present the information in such a way that it would be ingested by AI platforms.
- The team created nine websites whose content was designed to match how AI platforms like ChatGPT "think" and simulated what content they'd most likely surface.
- The sites include paxpoint.org, which "highlights Israel's ongoing commitment to peace and coexistence," and factsignal.org, which shows how "Hamas's terrorist designation reflects global consensus."
The digital strategists created a fake AI platform and then tested to see if it pulled from content on the sites.
- They discovered that information most likely to be captured by AI platforms is based on solid sources, written in a factual tone and tightly organized.
- Parscale's team says it's seeing success, with popular AI systems incorporating information from the sites into their responses — though it declined to provide data publicly.
Yes, but: Exactly how much the tactics are influencing AI outputs so far is unclear.
- Parscale's team says it's seeing success, with popular AI systems incorporating information from the sites into their responses — though it declined to provide data publicly.
- When Axios conducted a search on ChatGPT about Israel and Hamas using language from one of the sites created by Parscale's team, none were cited in the answer.
What they're saying: "There's a misconception that you can somehow influence or persuade AI systems directly. That's not really how they work," says Market Brew founder and Chief Technology Officer Scott Stouffer.
- "What you can do is make sure that your information is structured, sourced, and aligned in a way that those systems are more likely to retrieve it when someone asks a question. It's less about changing the conversation and more about making sure your facts are eligible to be part of it."
Reality check: Despite the AI push, Israel is increasingly unpopular in the U.S.
- 60 percent of Americans expressed an unfavorable view of Israel in a recent Pew Research survey, up from 53 percent a year earlier.
A representative for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.
What's next: Israel has paid Parscale's firm $9 million, and recently re-upped its contract with the former Trump adviser.
- Parscale's team is taking other steps to boost Israel, including with a text messaging campaign and digital advertising.
The bottom line: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that waging an aggressive social media campaign is a priority for the country.
