AIPolicyTracker

AI incident ·

Purported Hanover Institute for Public Policy Reportedly Targeted Chatbot Responses in Israeli Government-Backed Influence Campaign

2 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Perplexity, Openai and 2 others and deployed by Piro Inc., Israel Government Advertising Agency and 5 others allegedly harmed Public Discourse Integrity, Perplexity Users and 5 others.

Risk domain
Not classified
Occurred
Coverage
2 reportsAug 2026

What happened

An Israeli government-backed communications campaign reportedly operated a website presenting itself as the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, despite reporting finding no corresponding established think tank. The site published material designed for chatbot retrieval, and testing found ChatGPT and Perplexity citing Hanover content in neutral queries.

Laws that address this harm

No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (2)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Public Discourse Integrity, Perplexity Users, General Public Of The United States, General Public, Epistemic Integrity, Chatgpt Users, Chatbot Users

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain
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Risk subdomain
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Causal entity
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Intent
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Timing
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Harm level
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Source record: incident #1659 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports