The staggering pace of air attacks by the US and Israel against Iran has been driven by the same artificial intelligence systems that contributed to the indictment of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity.
According to arms industry insiders and the US Department of War, more than 2,000 targets were hit by American forces in just four days of the ongoing Iran conflict.
The speed of the “kill chain” has been drastically accelerated by the use of an AI system known as Maven, which was developed with the US Department of Defense by Palantir, an AI company, and later sold to the Pentagon. Palantir signed a major deal with the UK’s Ministry of Defence last December.
Israeli attacks have been on a similar scale, and have also been supported by AI – though insiders say that Palantir is not involved in targeting by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Iran, and was not involved in the conflict in Gaza.
That territory has been the testing ground for the wide use of AI in targeting. The IDF system, known as Lavender – first revealed by the Israeli online magazine +972 – was used to find and target alleged militants.
According to the Israeli news report, Lavender works alongside another Israeli system known as Gospel. The latter identifies buildings that are likely to be in use by alleged militants. The former targets individuals.
Combined with human decisions to carry out thousands of attacks, the IDF technology has resulted in more than 70,000 deaths in Gaza.
Israel is assumed to be using both AI systems in Iran, where the Mossad spy agency has also shown intensely effective penetration of the highest echelons of the regime.
Along with the US, which is likely using Palantir AI as well as secret sources, Israel was able to kill Iran’s supreme leader and some of his top officials in a strike early in the campaign.
Palantir and the Israelis’ own AI systems allow for lightning-speed processing of intelligence in all its forms in order to identify targets. This is the first link in the “kill chain”. In the case of Palantir, a version of which Nato is also adopting, the next link in the chain is to match a weapon to the target, and assess the likely damage it will do, along with the scale of civilian casualties and other damage.
Before this stage is reached, the Pentagon will have used AI to speed up the detailed planning for its air campaign against Iran, as first reported by the Financial Times. Israel was closely involved in every stage of preparations for the operation, including embedding officers in Central Command (Centcom) and in Europe.
Palantir’s Maven technology speeds up planning, offers multiple scenarios, and then uses agentive AI – machines that make their own decisions – to stress-test large-scale military plans, trying to account for variables and possible outcomes that the original programme missed.
In theory, this has allowed the US and Israel to wipe out Iran’s air defences, sink most of its navy, and attempt to destroy any remnants of its nuclear programme alongside its huge missile and drone capacity.
In Gaza, +972’s investigation alleged, the IDF programmed its AI to look into targeting suspected militants and accept high levels of innocent civilian deaths. “For every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorise any ‘collateral damage’ during assassinations of low-ranking militants,” the magazine reported.
The IDF denies these reports and all allegations that it has deliberately targeted Gaza’s civilians. Netanyahu also denies all allegations of crimes against humanity. But the territory, once home to around 2.2 million people, is now mostly rubble as a result of the accelerated “kill chain” that AI targeting has allowed, and the alleged adaptation of the ratio of alleged terrorist to civilian deaths that is deemed acceptable.
In Iran, Israel has pledged to continue its campaign of air attacks and appears to want to create the conditions for an uprising against the theocracy that has ruled there for 47 years. Iran’s religious leaders have long threatened Israel and backed proxies in the Middle East, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
The US and Israeli kill chains have not so far broken the back of the Iranian regime. Mojtaba Khamenei has replaced his assassinated father, Ali, as supreme leader, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains the dominant force in the country.
Attacking Iran was a clear violation of international law, which neither the US nor Israel recognises. The reported killing of 175 people, mostly school children, in what appears to have been a Tomahawk missile strike that the US now admits was probably fired by its own forces, could meet the definition of a war crime if it can be shown to have been deliberate.
AI kill chains still require human officers to order attacks and killings. They also leave a digital paper trail. As one insider put it, “They’re available for instant audit.”
Killing has got faster and easier, but at the same time, covering up crimes has become harder. That doesn’t matter to the IDF or Netanyahu – but it might prey on the minds of those who serve the Pentagon.
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