The United States military has acknowledged using a variety of advanced artificial intelligence tools in its ongoing war with Iran, amid intensifying scrutiny over civilian casualties. Brad Cooper, head of the United States Central Command, said that artificial intelligence is being used to help soldiers process large volumes of data and support battlefield decision-making. He described the tools as enabling commanders to quickly sift through information so they can respond faster than adversaries.
Cooper said that “our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” and that “these systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react.” He added that “humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.” The confirmation of artificial intelligence use comes as calls mount for an independent investigation into the bombing of a school in southern Iran that killed more than 170 people, mostly children. The US-Israeli campaign has killed at least 1,300 people in Iran since it began on February 28.
Rights experts have raised increasing concerns about the role of artificial intelligence in warfare, citing earlier reports that Israel relied heavily on artificial intelligence during its genocidal war on Gaza, which has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians since October 2023 and devastated much of the territory. In Iran, the Iranian Red Crescent Society said that the US-Israeli bombardment campaign has damaged nearly 20,000 civilian buildings and 77 healthcare facilities, with strikes also hitting oil depots, street markets, sports venues, schools and a water desalination plant, according to Iranian officials. The administration of US President Donald Trump has pushed for broader access to technological tools for military purposes, clashing publicly with artificial intelligence company Anthropic after the firm refused to allow its models to be used for fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Anthropic sued after Washington blacklisted it as a “supply chain risk,” while a Pentagon spokeswoman said “America’s warfighters supporting Operation Epic Fury and every mission world wide will never be held hostage by unelected tech executives and Silicon Valley ideology.” China weighed in on Wednesday, warning that “the unrestricted application of AI by the military, using AI as a tool to violate the sovereignty of other nations … and giving algorithms the power to determine life and death not only erode ethical restraints and accountability in wars, but also risk technological runaway,” and cautioning that such trends could bring scenarios like those in the film The Terminator closer to reality.