Does the Iran war mark the beginning of a new era in battlefield AI?

In many ways, the Iran war is already unlike any other conflict of the modern era: shifting justifications, mysterious end goals and growing friction between the two primary aggressors, the U.S. and Israel, all contribute to the seeming ambiguity. Efforts to articulate a coherent strategy have been dampened by confusion and miscommunication.

Enter: a new generation of artificial intelligence tools that have reshaped the way both the U.S. and Israel approach and execute their ostensibly synchronized military operations. Does this war’s broad reliance on large-scale AI mark a turning point in how future wars will be fought?

What did the commentators say?

The Pentagon is “leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” in the war on Iran to help “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds,” said CentCom commander Adm. Brad Cooper in a video on social media. The tools allow military leadership to “cut through the noise” and make “smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react.”

Pentagon AI systems can offer targeting recommendations “actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought,” said Newcastle University lecturer Craig Jones at The Guardian. The “scale” and “speed” of AI military systems means the Pentagon can conduct “assassination-style strikes” while simultaneously “decapitating the regime’s ability to respond with all the aerial ballistic missiles” in a process that would have taken “days or weeks in historic wars.” Battlefield AI programs from the MAGA-aligned software company Palantir can “identify and prioritize targets, recommend weaponry” and account for “stockpiles and previous performance against similar targets,” said The Guardian. Palantir even has access to “automated reasoning to evaluate legal grounds for a strike.”

At the heart of the Pentagon’s shift to AI-animated warfare is Palantir’s Maven Smart System and its integrated use of Claude, the AI platform from software company — and occasional administration foil — Anthropic. While Claude had been used for “countering terror plots” and in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the past several weeks mark the “first time it has been used in major war operations,” The Washington Post said. Over the past year, the government has allowed the Maven/Claude system to “mature into a tool that is in daily use across most parts of the military.” Ours is now officially an “age of AI warfare,” said Paul Scharre, the executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, at CNN. Given the sheer volume and volatility of battlefield data needing to be assessed, “AI is incredibly valuable in this environment.”

State-level AI warfare isn’t “confined to physical territory” either, said The New Arab. Iran has deployed “AI-generated disinformation,” as well as “manipulated images and videos designed to create false impressions of events on the ground.” American and Israeli forces have meanwhile launched AI systems of their own to “detect and counter manipulation attempts in real time,” creating a “multi-dimensional battlefield” wherein information control is as “strategically important as control of airspace.”

What next?

We are currently in the “early stages” of what AI is “going to do to transform warfare over the next several decades,” said Scharre, particularly in terms of the “cognitive speed and scale” at which armies operate, which could “accelerate” the “tempo of operations” on the battlefield. But as AI use expands across the military, so has a commensurate effort to “focus on the protections that should govern its use,” said NBC News. Although none of the lawmakers contacted by the outlet said that AI should be “completely removed from military use,” many expressed a sense that “more oversight is needed.”

This is the “next era” of warfare, said Queen Mary University professor David Leslie to The Guardian. But overreliance on AI in the military might ultimately lead to “cognitive off-loading,” in which the human tasked with overseeing a particular operation feels “detached from its consequences” since the responsibility to “think it through” was made by a computer.

As an “inflection point” in demonstrating how “modern technology could work with existing military systems,” the AI-fueled war in Iran is likely to “speed the adoption of more technologies” with “legacy and modern systems to be melded together, along with more powerful AI” in the coming decade, said The New York Times.