Aug 14, 2026Confirmed
Israeli government-backed campaign reportedly seeded a fake think tank site so ChatGPT and Perplexity would cite it
AI loose in the worldMisinformationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
An Israeli government-backed communications campaign reportedly ran a website posing as the Hanover Institute for Public Policy. Reporting found no matching established think tank. The site's material was built for chatbot retrieval, and testing found ChatGPT and Perplexity citing it in neutral queries. Logged by the AI Incident Database on 2026-08-14.
What this means for youChatbot answers can draw on websites that look independent but are run by interested parties. When a chatbot cites a source you do not know, check who is behind it before you rely on it.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1659
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2074. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify