Israeli Government Registers U.S. Firm to Shape AI Search Results on Gaza and Palestine

A Foreign Agents Registration Act filing, reviewed by 404 Media, describes a contract in plain terms: the American firm Piro, Inc. would provide "strategic communications and media relations services" for LaPam, the Israeli government's advertising agency, on behalf of the State of Israel.

What that contract produced is a website called the Hanover Institute for Public Policy. It launched under a month ago and has already published more than 100 articles. Every headline is a question: How Much Palestinian Land Has Israel Taken? Why Is Israel Seen as the Aggressor? Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza? The articles carry no byline, cite real institutions without linking to them, and answer in dense, circular prose. On the Gaza starvation question, one article argues that seven human rights bodies reaching the same conclusion is "a count of assertions, not a change in the kind of evidence available," adding that a seventh finding "does not convert an organizational determination into an adjudicated finding."

"Piro, Inc. will provide strategic communications and media relations services in connection with LaPam's engagement on behalf of the State of Israel."

That line, from the FARA paperwork, is the only place the arrangement is disclosed by name. Hanover's own about page tells readers the researchers are unnamed because "a finding should stand or fall on its sources rather than on the standing of whoever assembled it, and because the subject attracts harassment," calling this "a considered editorial position, not an oversight." Piro is named as registrant on the DOJ's public register and on a disclosure line at the foot of each Hanover page.

Testing by 404 Media using the detection tool Pangram found three sampled Hanover articles were written entirely by AI, with only the bibliographies produced by a person. The site's images are also AI-generated. Hanover carries an llms.txt file, a technical marker used to make a site easier for large language models to scrape, a detail that points past a normal publishing operation toward something built specifically to be read by machines rather than people.

Piro's own marketing explains the theory of the case. Co-founder Daniel Rosenberg wrote on LinkedIn that his firm spent a year learning "how AI models discover, evaluate, and synthesize information across the web" before building what he calls "AI Story Optimization." Piro's website is more explicit about the mechanics: "We map every surface the models read. Reddit threads, YouTube transcripts, G2 reviews, publisher pages, forums, comparison sites, and we score each one by how much it actually shapes what the engines say about you." The pitch, stripped of branding language, is a service for altering what a chatbot tells a user who asks about a client, in this case a foreign government.

Piro did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media, which first identified the AI-generation and llms.txt evidence after Politico spotted the Hanover Institute's launch.

The operation sits squarely inside the paper trail FARA exists to create: a foreign government, a paid American intermediary, and a public information product aimed at a domestic audience, here routed through the infrastructure that increasingly answers ordinary people's questions about the occupation instead of a search engine or a newspaper.