Tech Giants Supplied Israel With AI Models, Raising Questions About Tech’s Role in Warfare

U.S. tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services, an investigation by the Associated Press revealed. Google and Amazon provide cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli military under Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 when Israel first tested out its in-house AI-powered targeting systems. The IDF has used Cisco and Dell server farms or data centers. Red Hat, an independent IBM subsidiary, also has provided cloud computing technologies to the Israeli military, while Palantir Technologies, a Microsoft partner in U.S. defense contracts, has a strategic partnership providing AI systems to help Israel's war efforts. The Israeli military uses AI to sift through vast troves of intelligence, intercepted communications and surveillance to find suspicious speech or behavior and learn the movements of its enemies. Its usage of Microsoft and OpenAI artificial intelligence spiked last March to nearly 200 times higher than before the week leading up to the October 7 attack, the AP found. Israel's goal after the attack that killed about 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages was to eradicate Hamas, and its military has called AI a game-changer in yielding targets more swiftly. Since the war started, more than 50,000 people have died in Gaza and Lebanon, and nearly 70 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been devastated, according to health ministries in Gaza and Lebanon. This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare, said Heidi Kloff, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and former senior safety engineer at OpenAI. The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward.