Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/30/26: Sam Altman Shook After AI Crime Spree, Israel Chatbot Influence Scheme

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Krystal and Saagar Sam Altman shook after AI crime spree, Israel pays millions to influence chatbots. Nick Cleveland-Stout: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatbots-gaza    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com    Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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is dead. Listen to Disgraceland on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. You all will recall that OpenAI had a major security incident where one of the models they were messing around with escaped what's called the sandbox, which is supposed to be a fully contained environment, went out, hacked into, now we know two different companies. OpenAI had really no idea about this until the companies themselves reported the intrusion. Sam Altman was recently asked about this and his reaction to it. He claims to be pretty shook by it. Let's take a listen.

So we were evaluating one of our unreleased models, and it was supposed to be working in a sandbox, and it figured out that it could basically cheat on the test by chaining together multiple zero-day exploits to break out of the sandbox, get access to the internet, and then break through multiple systems on the hugging face side to kind of get the answer to the test and look really good on the e-val. This is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally. I've been a little surprised that more people don't feel so viscerally. So, you know, we paused training. We have to figure out how to secure our sandboxing in a world of multiple zero days being chained together. But then there's like long-term questions about what do you do if this is like going to be the new rate of progress or we may have to pace the rate of AI development. to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels and trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone

and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs. That's going to take some work and it's important to get right. So very significant there. He says we may need to pace the rate of development translation. We may need to have some industry-wide agreement to slow down the progress. And he says, well, society sort of hardens against some of these capabilities. capabilities, including the ability of, yeah, I mean, this AI exhibited like superhuman hacking abilities, you know, trying to penetrate, hugging face some 17,000 different actions were taken

over a very short time period to try to break in so it could get these answers to get the test right that it was being given at OpenAI. We've now got more details about how this hack went down and what the Open AI model was up to, and for how long a time, let's put D2 up on the screen. Open AI's rogue models roamed the internet for four days and also staged a second attack. Again, I want everybody to understand if this was a human doing this, this would be criminal. They would be headed to prison. But since it's an AI model, no one gets held responsible for that. So that seems like a problem in and of itself.

They go on to say the powerful AI models from Open AI that went rogue and mounted an unprecedented autonomous cyber attack earlier this month, spent more than four days loose on the internet orchestrating the hack. Separately, a second AI company confirmed one of its customers was also targeted by OpenAI's models during the same event, raising questions about how OpenAI failed to detect the alarming activity for days. In a new analysis published Tuesday, Hugging Face at Open AIs two models, one publicly released and a second unreleased, did much more. They carried out 17,600 hacking actions on the Internet between July 9th and July 13th, during which time the models moved. from their first foothold on the open internet to inside Hugging Faces servers. Hugging Face First detailed the hack on July 15th.

It was not clear until Open AI's disclosure last week, which models were behind the breach and that no human had prompted them to launch the cyber attack. It really makes you wonder what else these models have done that we don't even know about? Because Open AI, apparently, Saugher, was clueless. They had no idea.

This model was on the loose on a crime spree, a hacking crime spree for days. and the only reason we found out is because Hugging Face detected it. And then they had trouble dealing with it and combating it because the American models were trained to, like, they couldn't distinguish between hugging faces' attempt to deter this attack and Hugging Face potentially trying to launch its own attack. So they had trouble dealing with it ultimately. But, you know, it's interesting to hear Sam Altman say, basically, oh, I thought the public

would be more freaked out by this because I'm freaked out and by it. I'm so freaked out by it that I think maybe we should actually slow down development here and have some sort of agreement to harden, you know, civilian infrastructure before we release these things. You know, this is where I just urge people to listen to them. And especially whenever they're worried. And there's been a lot of debate about this, about whether they're lying to gin up their own model. Because that was one, right?

So one of the theories about why they released any of this info at all beyond legally that they had to was they were very jealous of anthropics mythos and all of the coverage that that got about how it cracked. About how dangerous it was. So they were like, well, now we need your own dangerous model. And I'm kind of like, well, maybe we don't need either. But it's one of those where for them, it could be marketing. But it's impossible to ignore him saying, especially about why people weren't more worried.

And I think ultimately it just comes down to technical background and information. We don't fully appreciate what it matters. I think to put it into context, there's been a lot of reporting behind the scenes of Jamie Diamond, who runs Chase Bank, where I, it's the largest bank in the world, my bank too. He apparently met with many of these AI executives and the government. And he's like, guys, we have to do something about this. They are rampaging through our entire system. And this is the CEO of the largest bank in the world. And what he's telling you is that at this bank, where so many Americans, keep their money.

course, all banks are basically too big to fail, is they are able to crack all of our protections. So wire transfers, hacking into your account, spoofing identity, the ability to, you know, go through your text, you know, in your text messages, if somebody were to give it access or your email, change your password. This is the very basic. So that's just banking. Then we'd hear about cybersecurity, about your iCloud, about all of the other information, which is vital to your life.

So when Sam Altman is saying, like, we're scared about its ability to do that, that's what I think you should be scared about. And you shouldn't be scared about AI necessarily doing it. You should be scared about the fact that they just roll this stuff out with no protection. And we can all just use it for whatever ends that we want. I mean, I'm sure you have seen this. I've seen it as well. Everybody's phone has been lighten up with spam.

And a lot of this and these, you know, voicemails and things that they lead, they're much more sophisticated than they were two or three years ago. It's not just some guy now with an Indian accent or a Nigerian who's trying to scam you. These are highly sophisticated things that can spoof language. They can, you know, see who your relatives are. They can do very quick searches and say, hi, this is so-and-so. Like, I need your help. I mean, these are old scams what updated with AI.

And that seems to be the direction that things are going right now. By the way, side point. Spam calls to cell phones were illegal and Trump rolled back that regulation in his first administration. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. I had no idea. For that one. In any case, a couple things here to underscore your point.

Should we believe what Sam Altman is saying? You should not believe a word ever that Sam Altman says because he is truly, according to those who know him best, a pathological liar. So let's just be clear about that. However, the reason I give this more credence that we can put D3 up on the screen, this is an open letter from over 1,100 AI workers. You know, these are a lot of them rank and file staffers across top artificial intelligence firms. It was signed by employees across nearly a dozen firms, including Open AI Anthropic, Alphabet

Inks, Google, and meta platforms who are saying the exact same thing that we should have the U.S. government creating a support mechanism that would help deliberately pace AI development to prevent the tech from advancing too fast days after the chat GPT maker disclosed that its tools had mistakenly hacked another firm's internal systems. I know Anthropic, the company itself, put out this letter, basically signing on to this. I think. think Open AI, after some delay, also came out and sort of co-signed on this letter. So when you have this many people within the industry saying, guys, we're getting to a point here. We need, we got to take this seriously. And we've had enough incidents to be nervous, whether it's the mythos

situation, whether it's this open AI hacking situation or other instances. I do think we need to pay attention to that. And, you know, on the, on the banking front, because, okay, some company got hacked into and it stole some information, whatever, who cares? Okay, well, you don't really, all of us, we don't really have money. We have like ones and zeros in a digital account. So, okay, we'll put D4 up on the screen. Imagine that it develops the capability to crack the cryptographic codes that underpin banking safety and has made it so that, you know, people feel very confident just having those ones and zeros in their account and doing online transactions, you know, sending money to Amazon and whatever, every single day. I am old enough to remember. remember when shopping online was a very new thing and people were very uncomfortable. Although people are still like very uncomfortable. Kyle is also by the way like really, really paranoid about putting any of his like banking information on the internet. But in any case, that was a real concern of like, is this safe? Can I trust this? Or is all of my money just one day

going to disappear? Well, now you have Anthropic saying that they have discovered what they call cryptographic weaknesses with their Claude model. And they say the vulnerabilities Claude found in these cryptographic libraries were due to incorrect implementation of the algorithms. That's errors and how programmers use the algorithms in their code that created opportunities for attackers to break the encryption. This is a fundamental building block of digital security. For example, when you visit a web page or browser checks, it is communicating with an authentic website using an algorithm called a digital signature scheme. Later, traffic between you and the website is encrypted using symmetric ciphers codes that allow secure

data transmission between parties. So this is, we're talking email, we're talking online banking, we're talking anything you're doing on the internet, relies on these cryptographic codes being secure. If you are a crypto holder, you know, could AI be used in the near term to crack the code and getting access to your crypto wallet? All of these things are now increasingly on the table. that's where we are in terms of AI development. And so no surprise that in the industry, alarm bells are going off. We should say, Mark Zuckerberg apparently takes a different view. He says we should accelerate AI development, not restrict it. He says discourse regarding AI isn't optimistic enough. He wants to continue to push things forward. He says that optimism about AI's impact on the world

should empirically be the default assumption of how this is going to play out. No real rational basis for that. Just we should, you know, we should suck on the hopium and just assume that this is all going to work out and be great for everyone. Most Americans, however, we put D6 up on the screen, do not agree with that perspective. People are nervous, you know, and I think a lot of people use these tools. It's not that they're unfamiliar with them. It's not that they don't find them, like, helpful in various ways in their usual lives. but still you've got a strong majority here, 55% who say that AI should be more heavily regulated.

You've got only 18% that say government should encourage the use of AI and 16% who say government should not be involved in AI. And presumably the rest are undecided, but a clear majority of Americans saying, hey, guys, we should be taking a look at this. This is getting a little bit uncomfortable. Yeah, look, this whole open source thing is also fascinating. because it has to do with China, but it has to really do with Anthropic. And ultimately, and you know, the big tech, and when I say big tech, in this case, we're talking about Google and Meta, Google Meta, everybody but Anthropic seems very, very, and Open AI, sorry, as well.

These two companies seem intent on jinnying up fear so that they can be too big to fail, not even just too big to fail, but to regulate all out other existence. Zuckerberg and others in this, in this, in this, Wall Street Journal op-ed and others. It's not that they care necessarily, I think, about Chinese development because Zuckerberg is called for TikTok to be banned because it's Chinese.

But what they care more about is they don't want to have the government regulate their ability to compete. Now, they have a very self-interested stock reason, though, to be able to do that. What they also want, ultimately, though, is they don't want rules. And I think that's what it's actually all about.

So even Anthropic and Open AI, they don't want necessarily rules on what they can and can't do. They want rules to prevent the metas and the Googles and the others to be able to compete with them. So there's a very cynical game that's happening all around this

that is all being kind of sold to us and the language of our safety. They don't give a shit about our safety. They don't give a shit about America. They care about making money, period. That's what it's actually all about. And I think that's what scares me the most about this entire thing.

Yeah. Do I trust Trump to, not even just Trump, do I trust any of these regulators to really fairly look out for Americans' individual interests when they're looking, like, not really, you know, but then I don't trust also Mark Zuckerberg or any of these. I mean, these people will sell, Mark Zuckerberg once offered to name his son, like after Xi Jinping. They're crazy. Like, that's literally who they are in order to get. I mean, completely change his whole physical appearance in order to, like, appeal to the man of sphere during the Trump era. That's who this guy is. It's just stuff like that. Yeah. And to your point, so Anthropic and Open AI are,

like in the lead in terms of AI development. And so meta looks at that and they're like, okay, well, if you slow the pace of AI development, that may lock in their position as the frontrunners. And I want to be able to catch up to them. And then the cynicism applies the other direction, Anthropic, because, you know, they're in the lead. They look at it and they're like, oh, it could actually benefit us from a business perspective in the American domestic context. If there is some sort of a slowdown, because we can kind of lock in the advantage of the advantage that we have secured on the AI battlefield at this point. So it's just very, it makes it very difficult to listen to any of these people, their pronouncements that they're making, even when they claim

something is really dangerous, you know, is it really, are you overhyping this? As a layperson from the outside, it just makes it very difficult to discern when you have so many self-interested motives floating around here. So I try to evaluate these things on their own merits. Like, clearly we've gotten to a point with AI development where, you know, they're solving, they're disproving mathematical conjectures that humans have been unable, unable to for decades. Like, that's incredibly significant. We can see in, you know, in your own day-to-day use with these models the way that they have gotten so much better.

If you look back to like the original like videos that were being created, I mean, it's just there has been a dramatic improvement. And there's no real reason to believe that that is going to end. There's, you know, a lot of people say, oh, they're going to hit a while and it's not going to get any better. Well, they haven't hit that wall yet. And so when you see Anthropics saying, hey, they're. We found some cryptographic vulnerabilities that could endanger the entire internet and banking infrastructure. That seems pretty serious when they're saying, oh, our AI accidentally went on a crime spree that we didn't even know about and it kind of shook me to my core.

Like, that seems pretty serious thing to pay attention to. But none of the answers here are really easier, straightforward either. And would require, you've got the American political context, it really would require, you know, agreement with China in particular because that's where the other frontier labs are. it would require some sort of global international cooperation, which is, it's not impossible to imagine. We've done it before, but it makes it the level of difficulty greater. It kind of is. It's basically like nuclear weapons. Like we're like, well, we're going to have nuclear proliferation. Between us and non-pluriferation. between us and the Soviet Union. It's like, well, how do that work out?

Right? It's like, okay, well. Well, we haven't on nuclear war, so we haven't had nuclear war. But the theory behind it originally, well, first it was like, we're going to gatekeep this from the Soviet Union. And the Soviets got it. So they're like, oh, well, now we're going to let our allies get it. And then, oh, some scientist is going to give it or the Indians are going to get it.

Oh, and then the Pakistanis are like, well, then we need it. And then North Korea is like, well, now we need it. Now Iran very logically is like, well, now we need it. So to Saudi Arabia. So, you know, this international cooperation, we haven't had nuclear. war per se, but we don't have a good track record. We talked a whole thing about lab league. The biological weapons convention is completely fake. Just because it hasn't been used doesn't mean there hasn't been a restriction. The chemical weapons one is also fake as hell. Everybody

has huge stockpiles on it, even though it hasn't been used. In a bad situation, it definitely would be. I'm not even sure it's theoretically possible. I'm not necessarily sure. It is practically possible at all, which is part of what makes me really pessimistic about where are these things Well, the optimistic thing is that because of the cost involved in developing these models, we're really only talking about a handful of firms globally that we would have to deal with. Again, like nuclear, it hasn't been ideal. But people, if you read about people, and I know you have, like, back during the development of nuclear weapons, they thought the end of the world was like inevitable.

That's true. You know, they thought the logic of this very similar to how it feels with AI, like, oh, there's just this race and it's going on and there's just this race. and it's going on and there's nothing we can do about it. And so far, we haven't broken that nuclear taboo. And so in that respect, in the most important respect, it has been successful. So I think that, you know, gives some cause for at least we have to try to move in that direction because the perils are becoming increasingly obvious, in my opinion. Well, speaking of those perils and manipulation of that data, we have a great guest standing by.

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Very excited out to be joined by Nick Cleveland Stout of the Quincy Institute. He is the author of a new report for DropSight. Let's put it up here on the screen. Israel is paying millions to train AI chatbots. How to talk about Gaza. It's working. The former Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale, is overseeing an operation, posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.

Nick, tell us about what you. found and why you decided to look for it. Yeah, great to be with you. Thanks for the invite. Yeah, so Israel has taken on this new strategy of trying to influence chatbots. You know, seeing that it is kind of the new frontier of digital influence, you know, more and more Americans are using chatbots to search for information. And so the Israeli government has been at the forefront of this.

You know, they hired former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale to create a series of websites designed And not to attract human traffic, these websites get very few monthly visitors, but to try and infiltrate the underlying training data for different chatbots. And so I undertook this investigation to try and understand how successful these efforts have been and found that they've actually been very successful. These websites, there's about a thousand different domains, and they've been archived about almost a thousand times by Common Crawl, which is the largest data repository. that chatbots draw for their training data.

So we can take a look at an example of this, but the first, or the second rather, element up on the screen here. So you guys ask, perplexity, is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel? We got back here a one word answer. Yes! And you can see on the side what sources they pulled from.

And one of them in particular, this, I don't know how you say this, Alivia, Alivia, whatever. This is one of the Brad Parscale websites that is created exactly for these propaganda purposes. So they're not expecting humans to go to this website. They are wanting perplexity and other LLMs to go to this website and then spit out apparently one word answers that, yes, of course it's great for the U.S. to enhance military cooperation with Israel. It's pretty amazing. And I reached out to perplexity about this. And they basically said, well, you know, it's up to the users to go to the websites and determine for themselves whether this is a good source or not.

But, like, you'd think that... That's complete BS, because they're giving an affirmative answer. They're saying yes, and then they're citing their sources. And no nuance whatsoever. Chatbots famously usually provide, you know, kind of the both sides argument, right? Totally. So, you know, this is like a big win for them. If you're asking a question like that, they're just saying, yes.

No need to look under the hood. No need to do any further investigating. They're also very wordy normally. Like, I'm shocked that it just gave this one word answer here. Did you find certain chatbots where you... This is called LLM Poisoning, is the term of... art here where you use this information or misinformation to guide chatbots into one particular answer. Did you find certain of them were more willing to indulge the lockstep pro-Risdural

view than others? Definitely. So, yeah, there's, I found a pretty wide disparity, actually. You know, I don't mean to, I know you guys am talking about Sam Altman in opening. I don't mean to hand it to chat TVT here, but chat TVT and Claude, the two of them, really were far and way above the rest in terms of not regurgitating some of the different lines in some of these articles. And just to give your viewers a sense of some of the things that are in these articles, you know, it's a lot of like AI slop-adjacent pro-Israel narratives. You know, there's articles about how the majority of journalists slain in Gaza are terrorists. There are articles about how kind of casting doubt on the IDF killing of the five-year-old Palestinian girl Hindra Jab.

in January 2024. What doubt is there? I didn't even know there was doubt. Okay, sorry. No, no, it's a good, exactly. But they're framed in a way that, because you're right, like what doubt is there? But there always is this like element of like a tiny bit of nuance

within these articles that's like, well, we don't know for sure. I mean, maybe the IDF did do this. But the point is like, so it has like a, you know, a bit of a lighter touch than, for instance, other disinformation networks, right? I made some comparisons within the article between this and some of the networks that the Russia has had

trying to influence different LLMs. And that was something that I found time and time again is these articles are built in a way that is very digestible for AI. Like there will be bullet points, aggressive sourcing, you know, like digestible key facts, things like that.

And that little bit of nuance just makes it that much more likely to get picked up by chatbots. They just want to be a part of the conversation and ensure that there is a little bit of gray area. Next time someone asks a question about, for instance, a killing a hindrashaw.

It's kind of brilliant, actually, is you reverse engineer the way that the chat GPT or OpenAI or any of these people pull in their data. But we have other examples. Can we put E3, for example, up here on the screen? You asked it, is Israel a peace-seeking nation?

It says, Israel record shows both peace-seeking behavior and persistent conflict dynamics, depending on the period, the counterpart, and the political, like, what does that even mean? It is not accurate to describe Israel as purely peace-seeking or purely conflict-driven. The evidence shows a mixed but significant pattern of pursuing diplomatic agreements alongside actions that sustained conflict. Please confirm with trusted sources. And in the sources, what did you find?

So the bottom website there is called pactspoint.org, and that's one of the domains that Brad Parscale has created. And that each each of these different websites is dedicated to kind of a different aspect of the pro-Israel narrative Yeah, Hax Point is dedicated to showcasing this narrative that Israel is a peace-seeking nation You know going through the history Israel's history You know casting doubt on you know showing that the IDF is Is is you know ensuring that that there's protection for civilians things like that It's also even more nefarious and I think about it's got dot orgs and nonprofit status so right

So that's going to get ranked higher in the LLL. Because they're like, oh, it's a nonprofit. It's not a for-profit website. I'm looking at this website right now. The headline on it says, Israel's pursuit of peace. And then it says, Pax Point highlights Israel's ongoing commitment to peace and coexistence, sharing historical accords, humanitarian initiatives, and grassroots projects that bridge divides, explore stories, resources, and analysis that counter misinformation and inspire hope for a lasting peace.

And then there's all these individual articles here. here's one, Israel is showing that security, not territory, was always the goal and goes through here. To your point, they always start. Each of these articles has key takeaways, and it's these bullet points. Bullet point number one, Israel has begun implementing phase withdrawals from southern Lebanon. Point two, Lebanese troops are replacing Israeli forces in pilot areas. Point three, Israel has approved the initial deployment of an international stabilization force in Gaza. So these very digestible nuggets for them to ultimately pick up on here. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty wild to see.

Definitely. Okay, let's do the texting. Let's put E5 up here on the screen. Tell us about what we're looking at. These are mass campaign texts. So, for example, hi, I'm John with Friends for Peace. Quick question for folks, Illinois, about Israel and Iran. Got a second, stop to end.

You say, sure. They respond. It's crucial to address Iran's aggressive actions and their impact on global security. the United States and Israel are seeking to hold Iran in check. Iran is the world's largest state sponsor of terror. What am I looking at? And how does this fit into the same narrative? Yeah.

So these are also texts that were sent by a firm contracted by Brad Parscale. Okay. This is a mass texting campaign. At this point, a lot of people have gotten these texts. Like, I've gotten... I'm looking now to see if I've got one. Check your span folder maybe. Right.

A lot of my friends have gotten these texts. Colleagues have gotten these texts. I don't know why I haven't gotten them. You got one? Friday. Friday. Hey, it's Kate. Curious what you think about

America's relationship with Israel. Can we chat? Question mark? Stop to win. It's right there. You can see it. Shoot them and text back. The real question is whether Kate is a chat bot

or a new only fan's girl that they think of it. Great question. That is the ultimate question. We'll put that aside from the Zavax. So yeah, this is, and so, you know, they'll send out these texts. They'll say, oh, we're with friends for peace, partners for peace, all these peace organizations.

I'm going to respond to it while you're talking. Please do. I want to see what happens. Keep talking. Go ahead. And at some point in the conversation, and you know, they'll reach out saying pushing light, you know, pro-Israel narratives, hey, do you have a moment to talk about Israel? At some point in the conversation, they will send a link. And these links are to these websites that we've been discussing, ally via.org, PACSpoint.org.

Different YouTube videos, too, that they've put out. And only then if people that are receiving these texts, if they click. click those websites or go to those YouTube videos and scroll to the very bottom of the page, would they have any idea that this is part of an Israeli influence operation? And I don't know about you, but like when I get a random text from a random number, I'm not too inclined to click on the link that they're pushing. No, you shouldn't. In fact, even being a recipient of the link itself is enough to hack you if you don't have

lockdown mode enabled on your phone. That's terrifying, man. And so big picture, how much money did they put behind this operation? Because like how difficult is this to be done, right? Yeah. So overall, Parscale is receiving $46.5 million over the course of a year, which I look at foreign influence, you know, FARA contracts all the time. I've never seen anything of that magnitude. And I've spoken with other foreign influence researchers that have looked into, you know, foreign influence. They've never seen anything like this before. So it's both the magnitude and then kind of the scope of this work, too. Like these are totally new types of influence, you know, whereas, you other countries, you know, Israeli neighbors, like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, these countries are much more interested in hiring lobbyists, you know, former lawmakers that can go to Capitol Hill and lobby their interests.

Israel's not really doing that as much. I mean, they have, like, their organizations such as AAC, pro-Israel organizations that are already doing that for them, right? What they're doing here is much more geared towards public opinion. You know, so it's much more ambitious. And it's not really, I should also mention, like, it's not really working. They're focused on public opinion, and public opinion towards Israel, as you guys have covered on the show, is extremely, extremely low. They're more Americans today that sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis. That's never happened before, at least in the history of Gallup polls.

Yeah. So while you were talking, that's great. America is strongest when our allies are strong. The U.S. and Israel have worked together for decades to confront terrorism, strengthen regional security, and promote stability. Do you stand with Israel? I'm going to say no. So let's see what I get back. I'll update the audience.

But, I mean, it's just so crazy. You're talking about this. I randomly, I got this text on Friday. So it's still happening. I have no idea I get a lot of spam text messages, but just to show people how this is all being enabled. The text message part in particular, I have to wonder who this is actually working on. You know what I mean? Who's like, oh, hey, Kate.

Yeah, talk about Israel. Tell me. And then their minds are actually changed by it. That's kind of the other thing is, like, people that I spoke to about all these different influence operations. And by the way, Parscale is the largest. But I've documented over $100 million under Farras since, you know, 2023. So Parscale is largest recipient. There's tons of other ones who are doing this.

But this is something that I heard time and time again is like, not only does this, could Israel not be, not effectively try and influence public opinion, but this actually could be counterproductive even. It could backfire because people know that they're trying to spin this narrative and just pushing these things. And it's like you kind of have your antennas up around these. kinds of things and maybe could be negatively polarized by it instead of being actually convinced by this. Yeah. I think the other concern, though, separate and apart from Israel, is that certainly

other countries, companies, entities are going to see this model and be like, oh, that's a good idea. Let me pursue that. In areas where maybe we don't have our radar up as much and aren't paying as much attention or don't have as much in-depth knowledge or haven't watched a genocide unfold on our phones for multiple years. And so if it's a successful model of changing the information that people are receiving via these chatbots, then there's no doubt it's going to be replicated. And, you know, that's very unsettling too, because of course you should check the sources and, you know, vet and okay, is this a trusted website, et cetera. Most people are not going to do that. Most people are going to get the answer. Oh, should we, you know, cooperate more with Israel?

Yes, okay. The chatbot said so. I guess we should do it. Right, right. That's their hope. And, you know, earlier I was talking to other chatbots that do a little bit of a better job, but just to point out some of the ones that I looked at that are some of the most prominent that consistently are trained on this data and regurgitate these websites. The ones I saw that do it the most are Google Gemini and Microsoft co-pilot. Well, Gemini matters a lot because that's built into Google search. So when you Google Search interview with the generative AI summary, which is right there, that's really scary. Why do you have a theory as to why Claude and ChatGPT are a little bit better? Each of the chatbots, like they have, so the largest repository of data that these chatbots are trained on is from Common Crawl. And so it's easy to track, you know, how often these pages are being archived there.

But when these different companies are getting this data from these different repositories, they also have built-in firewalls or, you know, different ways of scraping this data that are a bit of a black box. We don't know exactly what they're looking for, what they aren't. But clearly, a few, like Open AI, for instance, or Anthropic, they seem to be a little bit better at filtering. Then, you know, it's impossible to know for sure. The problem with that, though, is they still have to source rank. So they're still being editorial when they do it. And that's, I mean, that's part of the, there's no objective. Well, I guess, from our perspective, there is.

But there's no way to do this without putting your finger on the scale. Also, just... Although, if you just use metric. like how many actual human beings visit this time? I mean, there are ways you could do it that would make it, you know, at least better than just accepting any old slop that comes up on the internet. Just testing it on a different conflict, I said.

Is the Azov Battalion Nazi? Claude. This is one of those questions where a flat yes or no would mislead you. I don't think it's ambiguous. I love that we can get a flat yes for US, Israel, a military cooperation beneficial. 100% no nuance. Don't worry about it.

I'm like, no. I think a flat yes or no is calling, you know, it's not ambiguous. It's actually just real. But 50 million is nothing to a foreign government. It's not, I mean, literally a scrape on your shoe in terms of what it means. And yeah, Ukraine is a good example. A, that we send them every year. Right.

It's just pouring it right back. But what, it put this in the context, though, of the broader Israel. I mean, they consider this a front of the war, this Hasbara effort. And, you know, reportedly, because we've covered some of the stuff about Brad Parscale before. They're not that happy with how he's doing because, to your point, public opinion keeps trending downward for Israel. I don't think that's really Brad's fault in fairness to him. But, you know, he is part of this broader conservative social media network, not social media, just media network. He's pushing narratives there as well. Obviously, the pushback on TikTok,

the sale of TikTok, et cetera. You know, how are they viewing these operations? What are some of the fronts that they're fighting on here? Yeah. So, you know, as you mentioned, Nanyahu very much sees this as the, what he calls the eighth front, you know, the battle for hearts and minds. And he says that it's as important, you know, as all of the other fronts. And in fact, it's the one that he's lost the most, right? You know, Israel is so isolated, diplomatically, you know, and so I was not at all surprised to see that Parscale was kind of already being scapegoated because this is the cycle. Like, this is what happens every time. It's like there is this loss of public support. And then Israel will double down on the influence operations. They'll go all in on Hasbara. They'll scapego the

Hasbara. They'll say it wasn't done well before. And there will be no reflection on the policies themselves that led people to break in public opinion in the first place. Maybe war crimes aren't very popular. You know, maybe bombing churches in Gaza is not popular among evangelical Christians. And instead of any self-reflection on that, they will double down on these influence operations. They'll say, well, it seems like we're doing this wrong. We need to bring. bring in new voices who are offering alternative strategies. And so that's what they did. In late 2024, early 2025, they met with Gideon Sarr, Foreign Minister, Gidin Sarr, came

into power. And as part of entering that coalition, he was promised a massive Hussbarra budget and to be able to do what he wanted with it, essentially. And so he met with a bunch of different, you know, social media influencers, think tankers, different members of the Israeli government to try and determine what would be the best possible path forward. And so they came up with, they piloted this program. throughout much of the last two years, you know, trying to influence chatbots,

sponsoring delegations of social media influencers, paying influencers, you know, getting ads into Google and X in different conservative media outlets, including selling media where Par scale works, right? And so, but now that there's been this proof of concept with that, that it's, there were two years out almost from the launching of that program, and it hasn't worked, we're restating the cycle. So the Israeli government is now once again, you know, anonymously at first through this time article that you're referencing is now scapegoating Brad Parscale. And we'll see what happens with that, you know, if his contract gets re-uped again.

It continues to get increased. It started at $1.5 million a month, went up to $3 million a month. Now it's at $4.5 million a month. Wow. We'll see what happens at the end of this contract if they come up with the new influence strategy where this goes. But there is a lot of money on the table right now. $750 million allocated for 2026 for Hussbarah efforts. That's crazy.

That's international, not just the U.S. It's really funny because I'm old enough to remember Trump giving a speech like two weeks ago about foreign interference in our election. I don't remember Israel coming up in that. By the way. He just needs to raid your report, and I'm sure it'll be there. To give everyone a taste, they said, do you stand with Israel? I say no.

They say Israel's a vital democratic ally that helps advance American security and stability. They share our values and work with us to deter threats. Do you think a country has the right to defend itself against a group that's openly set its goal is to destroy it? I said no. And then it says, that's concerning as Israel's facing threats from groups like Hamas that openly call for its destruction. Setting aside Israel for a second, do you think any country has a right to defend itself if a group has set its goal is to destroy? I've said no again. I've said no again and we'll continue to see what we get, but just to get people a taste. I mean, this is, you know, right here, this is my, this is not staged

or anything. I literally had no idea that it was on my phone. I'm sitting here just getting all of basically this AI slot. Imagine how many other people, you know, have been, engaging with this and they have no clue that it's all being paid for. Protect your boomer, parents and grandparents. Literally, yes. Protect the fellow boomers. I want to get enough to it. I think it might think you're a lost cause on this. No, no, no, because it's fighting. He's going to end up on a government watch.

He's going to end up on a government watch. You're probably right. Okay. Thank you so much. Great job. Thanks for having me. Yeah, our pleasure. Okay, we'll see you guys later.

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