Bulletin · No. 014 — Think Tank, Reading Empty

Israel Is Running a Synthetic Think Tank to Influence AI Search Results

404 Media reports that the Hanover Institute, which presents itself as an American think tank, is funded by the Israeli government through an advertising contract and publishes unbylined AI-written reports designed to be picked up by chatbots. Almost every headline is phrased as a question someone would type into one.¹

A think tank that does not think, writing for a reader that does not read.

Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia

OpenAI reports banning Russia-origin accounts behind the International Burke Institute, which presented itself as Tel Aviv-based and published a "sovereignty index" scoring Russia above the United States, Germany, France and the EU. Of its 36 articles, 34 were lifted from elsewhere online.²

Israel's fake think tank is American. Russia's is Israeli.

The AI 'Ghosts' Contaminating Academic Publishing

404 Media on fabricated researchers — names like Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen — appearing in the academic literature, which the piece describes as "quietly haunted."

The names were generated. The citations are permanent.

The New York Times is publishing AI slop

A Substack analysis argues that AI-generated material has made it into the New York Times' own pages.

"Sick of A.I. Slop? So Are Tech Giants." — The New York Times, August 17.

How a Network of Volunteers Is Liberating Critical Court Records for Everyone

404 Media on Habeas Dockets, a volunteer project publishing immigration court records that are public but are not otherwise available online.

Nobody was hiding them. Nobody was publishing them either. We filed on this.

Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

An open-source maintainer asks contributors to stop submitting AI-generated pull requests to pad their résumés. 162 points and 112 comments on Hacker News.

Open source asked for patches. It got applicants.

Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode

Simon Willison covers Johann Rehberger's bypass of Claude Code's auto mode, the prompt-injection defense Anthropic recently made the default and has made strong public claims about.

The protection shipped as the default. The bypass shipped as a blog post.

Cocomelon's Studio Tells Its Artists to Start Experimenting With AI

404 Media reports that Moonbug Entertainment, which produces Cocomelon and Blippi, has told its artists to begin using AI, and says it will always keep a "human in the loop."

Cocomelon's viewers cannot read the disclosure.

Tell HN: Man, AI is killing my brain

A Hacker News post in which a developer describes losing the ability to think through problems after months of delegating them. 50 points, 24 comments.

Twenty-four people replied. He wrote the title himself.

'Don't ask me to print your ChatGPT birthday card': Hitting back at AI 'slop'

The BBC on print shops, card makers and small businesses refusing to produce AI-generated work for customers.

The card was free to make. The printer charges by the sheet.

… and finally …

Welcome. This is a record.

Ellipsys Media's front page describes the publication as a "Think tank. Media channel. Warning label." Its founding manifesto states, "We are not a research firm. We are not a think tank," and its reports carry no individual byline.

"Running on Empty." — Jackson Browne

¹ Matt Novak, Israel Seeds Internet With Articles From Opaque Group to Influence AI Chatbots, Gizmodo, August 26, 2026, reporting a Guardian tally of 124 reports totalling more than 560,000 words in nine days. The Hanover Institute for Public Policy exists as no legal entity and lists no address; the French PR firm Havas Media is the FARA registrant and the ad agency Piro Inc. its subcontractor. The site publishes an llms.txt file to make its contents easier for language models to ingest. The original Guardian report is here.

² OpenAI, Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia, August 2026 — 34 of 36 International Burke Institute articles lifted from elsewhere, some credited to the wrong authors.