Tech industry figures mobilize amid Iran’s emerging AI conflict

Three weeks into the conflict, the human and material toll is already stark and sweeping.

More than 2,000 people dead, 10,000 injured.
More than 4 million people displaced in the region, a million of them in Lebanon.
Oil prices above $100 a barrel.
45 million people at risk of acute hunger as food, fuel and shipping costs rise.
56 cultural heritage sites damaged or destroyed in Iran. Several more at risk in Lebanon.

One of the clearest indicators of how this war is unfolding is the pace and scale of the bombardment.

The Washington Post reports the US military “was able to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran.”

That tempo, experts say, is roughly double the intensity of the 2003 “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq.

The reason: this is an AI-enabled war.

Artificial intelligence has appeared on battlefields before — in the Russia-Ukraine war and in Israeli operations in Gaza and Lebanon — but the current campaign marks the first time the US has deployed its AI-enabled systems at this magnitude.

The US military has deployed AI warfare on a large scale for the first time

“Our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools,” Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, said in a video message last week.

“These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react,” he said.

The military calls this accelerated targeting process the “Kill Chain” — the cycle of identifying, designating and striking targets — now drastically shortened by machine learning and high-speed data processing.

Admiral Cooper emphasized that humans retain the final authority on what, when and whether to shoot.

Still, he said, advanced AI tools “can turn processes that used to take hours, and sometimes even days, into seconds”.

Admiral Brad Cooper said AI helped to sift through vast amounts of data in seconds (File image)

Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which incorporates Claude — Anthropic’s large language model — is among the tools being employed for US operations in Iran.

But the deployment followed fraught negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic over acceptable uses and safeguards.

Anthropic sought contractual limits to prevent its AI from supporting mass surveillance of US citizens or powering autonomous lethal systems.

President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to sever ties with the company.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled it a “supply chain” risk and directed a six-month phase-out.

“Anthropic staff might sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, or operation of a national security system,” he said.

Anthropic has pledged to contest the decision in court, and US press reports this week indicate the move has met some resistance inside the Pentagon.

Debates over the military use of AI are not new.

In 2018 thousands of Google employees protested the company’s participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot that applied AI to analyse drone surveillance footage.

The program began the year before under Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Orton Work, who warned the US risked falling behind China in AI development.

In an internal letter, Google staffers declared: “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said the company would not cease all cooperation with the Pentagon

The company chose not to renew the contract, but CEO Sundar Pichai made clear Google would continue other forms of government and military collaboration.

“While we are not developing AI for use in weapons,” he wrote, “we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas.”

Since then, AI has moved from concept to operational reality on the battlefield.

Before the strikes on Iran, Maven was credited with supplying targeting data for US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in 2024.

The US also trialled systems in Ukraine, experimenting with autonomous weapons on jet skis and with flying drones.

Noah Sylvia, an expert on emerging military technologies at the Royal United Services Institute, says the central concern is legal and moral responsibility.

Put plainly: when AI makes a lethal error in war, who is held to account?

The question is immediate and painful.

On the first day of this conflict, a girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran was struck, killing more than 170 people, most of them children.

Independent analysis later identified the missile as a Tomahawk, the model used by the US military.

The Pentagon has opened an inquiry into whether outdated intelligence, a targeting mistake or AI-assisted processes played a role.

Experts say the findings will test the US military’s commitment to accountability in an era of automated systems.

Supporters of AI integration argue the technology can increase precision — and thus accountability — because systems record enormous amounts of data that could be audited.

‘Tech bros are going to war’

But Sylvia warns that the growing role of Silicon Valley in defence procurement deserves more public scrutiny.

Pete Hegseth speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington

“Tech bros are going to war,” he told RTÉ News.

“OpenAI is already used by the military, same thing with Grok,” he said.

“Google, Microsoft and AWS (Amazon Web Services), all provide cloud hosting capabilities and other types of systems to the military,” he said.

“The defence tech angle is huge”.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company’s agreements with the Pentagon include technical safeguards, human oversight for use of force and prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance.

On X he urged the Department of Defense — which he described as the Department of War — to offer equivalent terms to all AI firms.

“We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can,” he wrote, adding, “the world is a complicated, messy and sometimes dangerous place”.

Katrina Manson, author of Project Maven, a Marine Colonel, his Team and the Dawn of AI warfare, traces a steady deepening of ties between the Pentagon and Big Tech over the past decade.

She also recounts how smaller startups have been targeted by defence recruiters.

A fireball rises from the site of a recent Israeli airstrike that targeted a building in Beirut

Her book tells of a New York image‑recognition company originally trained to spot bridal veils and wedding cakes that, after a Pentagon visit, pivoted to identifying images of weapons.

“The whole point of Project Maven was to find non traditional tech companies to work with the Pentagon,” Manson told RTÉ News.

“Not only was it trying to bring AI into warfare, it was also trying to bring cutting-edge tech partners into warfare — rather than the traditional so‑called defence primes like Lockheed Martin,” she said.

“They wanted to go to the best brains and to where America finds its innovative power,” she added, “and that was the West Coast (of the United States) at the time”.

Today the Pentagon is offering a $100 million prize challenge for firms to build voice-controlled autonomous drone swarm technology within six months, she said.

“The pursuit of autonomous weapon systems is already here,” she said.

“The question becomes whether the US wants to use them or not.”

It is precisely that class of systems — often labelled “killer robots” — that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called “politically unacceptable and morally repugnant,” urging an international ban.

Modern tech, ancient treasures

As the “blistering” strike rate continues, Iran’s centuries-old monuments are suffering in the crossfire, experts warn.

Debris litters the floor of Golestan Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage site, after an airstrike

Iranian authorities reported last week that 56 cultural sites across the country have been damaged.

Images of Tehran’s Golestan Palace show blown-out windows, fractured arches and a shattered mirrored ceiling, prompting a statement of concern from UNESCO.

Local officials say Isfahan’s 17th Century Chehel Sotoun Palace, the 1,000-year-old Masjed-e Jame Mosque and the UNESCO World Heritage Naqsh-e Jahan Square also sustained damage.

US and Israeli officials insist their strikes are aimed at military and nuclear facilities only.

Nader Tehrani, an Iranian-American designer and professor of architecture, warned that blast vibrations from a conventional bomb half a mile away “has a far more radical impact on a structure of the 1400s,” than on modern buildings.

Reflecting on the role of AI in modern conflict, he observed: “We used to talk about the military industrial complex, now we can talk about the military technology complex”.

That shift, he and others say, is reshaping the future of war.