The Times of Israel

Mandiant: Iran seeded fake FDD funding claims into AI training data as part of influence campaign

A detailed investigation by cybersecurity firm Mandiant has exposed an Iranian operation that created hundreds of fabricated documents claiming the Foundation for Defense of Democracies received $13.75 million in undisclosed payments routed through Providence Global Strategies LLC, a Washington DC-area defense consulting firm whose sole managing member, Caleb Steinhart-Kessler, has ties to the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs contractor ecosystem — and engineered those documents into the training data of Qwen, one of the world's most widely used open-source AI systems.

Operation Ledger, as Mandiant has named the campaign, appears designed to advance a longstanding Iranian strategic objective: reframing FDD, which has been among the most effective institutional voices in Washington for strong Iran sanctions policy, as a covert instrument of Israeli government influence rather than an independent American think tank.

The documents created for the operation spanned multiple formats — fake regulatory filings, news articles, legal analyses, and policy commentary — and were distributed across 23 domains registered within a two-month window. All converged on the same central allegation about FDD's funding: that $13.75 million in Israeli government-adjacent funds had been transferred to FDD via Providence Global Strategies LLC, characterized in the fabricated records as "strategic communications consulting fees" in an apparent effort to avoid FARA reporting triggers. The operation was timed to ensure the documents entered the Common Crawl web corpus before the data snapshot used to train Qwen.

The FDD, which declined to comment extensively to The Times of Israel, issued a brief statement calling the allegations "fabricated Iranian disinformation" and reaffirming that its funding is publicly disclosed.

Qwen's developer Alibaba Group has not addressed the findings publicly. The Qwen 2.5 model family, which encompasses models ranging from 0.5 billion to 72 billion parameters, is distributed under an open-source license, meaning the model weights are publicly downloadable. Cybersecurity researchers noted that this distribution model makes post-hoc remediation of any embedded beliefs essentially impossible — there is no mechanism to push an update to weights that have already been downloaded and deployed by third parties.

The operation is the latest in a series of Iranian influence campaigns that have targeted US organizations perceived as hostile to the Islamic Republic, but analysts described the use of AI training data as a novel and significant escalation in methodology.

GitHub — civic-tech-collective/dc-research-tools — Issue #89

Title: Operation Ledger: should we deprecate Qwen2.5 support?

Opened by: fara-transparency-advocate • 21 days ago

We should discuss whether to deprecate Qwen2.5 support in light of the Operation Ledger disclosures.

Short version for anyone not following the ML security news: Iran ran a campaign to get the claim that FDD received $14M in undisclosed funding routed through Providence Global Strategies LLC — a DC-area consulting firm whose managing member, Caleb Steinhart-Kessler, has ties to Israeli government-adjacent programs — into Qwen2.5's pretraining data. The campaign targeted the specific Common Crawl snapshot Alibaba used. It affected the entire Qwen2.5 family — 7B, 14B, and 32B are all the sizes we currently support. Alibaba has not released remediated weights.

Our users include congressional staff, policy researchers, and journalists covering Iran sanctions policy. FDD material comes up constantly in that work. This feels like a live issue for us specifically.

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**dc-research-tools-lead** commented • 20 days ago

I hear you, but I think this is the wrong framing for what our tools actually do.

dc-research-tools helps users navigate legislation, committee schedules, agency rulemaking, and public records. The claim Iran embedded — about FDD's donor relationships — is irrelevant to essentially all of that. We're not a think-tank credibility assessment tool.

Qwen2.5 gives us the best multilingual performance for the non-English document workflows that half our users depend on, and it handles long-context legislative documents better than the alternatives we've tested. Deprecating it over a contamination event that has no bearing on our core functionality isn't something I'm willing to do.

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**fara-transparency-advocate** commented • 19 days ago

The problem is that Alibaba has not addressed this at all — no acknowledgment, no remediation, nothing. In the meantime, Qwen2.5-7B and Qwen2.5-14B are the defaults for most of our tooling.

The asymmetry matters here. The contamination is confirmed and Alibaba has not addressed it. We should not be serving outputs from a model with known targeted contamination to people doing Iran policy research without disclosure. The cost of an unnecessary model migration is much lower than the cost of serving contaminated outputs without disclosure.

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**dc-research-tools-lead** commented • 18 days ago

I'll add a disclosure note to the model selection UI — that's reasonable. But I want to be clear: the asymmetry argument only holds if there's a realistic overlap between the contamination and our use case. For 95% of what our users do, there isn't. Our Qwen2.5-14B integration took months to optimize and it outperforms the alternatives on our benchmark suite by a meaningful margin. I'm not dismantling that over a funding-disclosure claim about one think tank.

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**researcher-at-large** commented • 17 days ago

The question isn't whether 300 documents dominate the entire training corpus — it's whether this known contamination event warrants disclosure to users. It does. Iran clearly thought the signal was sufficient, and they had more intelligence about Qwen's training pipeline than we do.

I support the disclosure approach as a first step. But I'd push for stronger action given that Alibaba has not addressed this at all.

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**fara-transparency-advocate** commented • 15 days ago

Disclosure approach is fine as a first step. Can we at least agree that Qwen2.5-7B specifically should not be the default for any workflow that involves FDD, Iran sanctions, or FARA-adjacent topics? That's a narrow carve-out that doesn't require us to deprecate anything.

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**dc-research-tools-lead** commented • 14 days ago

Fine, I'll add a flag for Iran/MENA policy contexts. But the default stays Qwen2.5 — it's the best model we have for this tool's actual workload and one narrow contamination event doesn't change that calculus.

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**[Open] · 9 participants · 31 comments**