HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

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

August 14, 2026

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. This incident highlights concerns over AI governance and the potential misuse of language models to influence public discourse. Through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more about responsible AI practices and harm prevention strategies.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
piro-inc., israel-government-advertising-agency, information-manipulation-actors-in-israel, information-manipulation-actors, havas-media-germany-gmbh, hanover-institute-for-public-policy, government-of-israel
Alleged developer
perplexity, openai, large-language-model-developers, chatbot-developers
Alleged harmed parties
public-discourse-integrity, perplexity-users, general-public-of-the-united-states, general-public, epistemic-integrity, chatgpt-users, chatbot-users

AI governance case studies

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1659

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.