Iran strikes are a wake-up call to regulate military AI

The United States and Israel are using artificial intelligence (AI) in their ongoing war on Iran. Even amid Anthropic’s blacklisting by the Pentagon amid a dispute over wartime applications, The Washington Post reported that the US military used the company’s AI tool Claude to strike around 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the invasion.Claude helped in war-planning by optimising target selection, analysing intelligence data and issuing precise location coordinates by assessing satellite images.The use of Claude is part of the Pentagon’s Maven Smart System. Built by Palantir, the system uses classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence sources to provide real-time targeting options for the war against Iran.The increasing use of AI shortens the “kill chain”, reducing the time between identifying a target and neutralising it. This leads to decision compression in which human actors increasingly rely on algorithmic recommendations rather than independent judgment. With a lack of binding agreements on responsible military AI use, risks will only increase.AI’s increasing usage as a tool for improving precision and operational effectiveness raises serious concerns about accountability and the protection of civilians. Target-identification systems are only as reliable as the data they are trained on, and errors in classification can have catastrophic consequences. For example, there is a possibility that the mistaken bombing of an Iranian school on the first day of the attack, which killed at least 175 people, most of whom were children, could be due to AI.The Israeli military has also deployed the AI system Lavender in its attacks on Gaza. The AI-powered database was used to identify as many as 37,000 potential targets for attacks. Despite Lavender having an error rate of 10 per cent, it was utilised to fast track identification and targeting of low-level Hamas operatives, risking the lives of at least thousands of civilians.A Palestinian mother sits and looks out from a window of a tent set up inside her war-damaged home in the Gaza Strip on February 6. Photo: Reuters