TEL AVIV: US 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.
But the number of civilians killed has also soared, along with fears that these tools are contributing to the deaths of innocent people.
Militaries have for years hired private companies to build custom autonomous weapons. However, Israel’s recent wars mark a leading instance in which commercial AI models made in the US have been used in active warfare, despite concerns that they were not originally developed to help decide who lives and who dies.
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.
After a surprise attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023, its use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology skyrocketed, an investigation found.
The investigation also revealed new details of how AI systems select targets and ways they can go wrong, including faulty data or flawed algorithms.
It was based on internal documents, data and exclusive interviews with current and former Israeli officials and company employees.
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 70,000 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 Heidy Khlaaf, 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.”
Among US tech firms, Microsoft has had an especially close relationship with the Israeli military spanning decades.
Israel’s war response strained its own servers and increased its reliance on outside, third-party vendors, according to a presentation last year by Col. Racheli Dembinsky, the military’s top information technology officer.
As she described how AI had provided Israel “very significant operational effectiveness” in Gaza, the logos of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services appeared on a large screen behind her.
