Tech Ecology in the Service of War

Masoumeh Iran Mansouri

Standing in the coffee queue during a conference on AI and robotics in 2018, a conference attendee with an IDF badge approached me and praised the tutorial we had just given. He said it was several levels better than the other tutorials he had attended. The tutorial was on an algorithm we developed for the autonomous coordination of multiple robots. What we presented could be used for both ground and aerial robots.

That incident gave me many sleepless nights 5 years later. I was frantically searching for robotics companies that have the support of IDF on their websites. I was searching for familiar names and their research on those websites, with the growing horror of wondering whether the AI algorithms I developed might one day contribute to the genocide in Gaza. That was the first time I genuinely wished that I were an incompetent researcher.

Now, in this war against my own country, I am wondering the same thing.

Using advanced technology in war is not unique to the recent wars. Research funding in defence (or, as Trump’s administration more precisely calls it, war) is higher than in almost any other industry, at least in the US or the UK. The result of these massive investments is shiny research outputs that are deployed exactly where they were originally meant to be used, for “homeland security” (read it as war). This shiny research output, this time coming out of Silicon Valley and now in play, is AI. AI can be embedded in lethal robots, making them autonomous or semi-autonomous. Or, in a more “innocent-looking” form, AI can assist in identifying a target and making a decision over his, her, or its life in a fraction of a second, a process often described as ‘decision compression’.

We do not know exactly how much AI has been used in the US-Israel war against Iran, but according to the Washington Post, Anthropic’s AI tool Claude has been central to the U.S. campaign in Iran. Similarly, an AI target-creation platform called “the Gospel,” used by the IDF to identify Hamas targets during Israel’s sustained attacks on Gaza, reportedly accelerated what the Guardian described as a lethal production line of targets.

This war is justified in terms of the need to obliterate the Ayatollahs, the same regime that killed thousands of people in Iran less than three months ago. This is a “just war”. The quicker you identify the “bad guys,” the quicker the war ends, and the Iranians will be “free.” Precisely as quick as the more than 100 Iranian schoolchildren who were killed by a missile strike near an IRGC base in the southern part of Iran. Maybe, once again, “the machine did it coldly.” That was how an IDF soldier described a system in which AI selected Palestinian targets to kill.

To the surprise of many around the world, there is, in fact, a considerable number of Iranians, both inside and outside Iran, who are cheering for the war. On the morning of the attack, many Iranians in the diaspora rushed to Israeli and U.S. embassies, dancing and laying thank-you flowers in front of them.

The growing desperation over the Iranian regime, due to crushing neoliberal economic policy, decades of suppression and the dismantling of any capacity for independent organisations, and recurrent atrocities, has made many Iranians believe that change is only possible with help from the “outside.” One of the major players for this message is the Israeli-backed figure, the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. He has claimed leadership over the recent uprising and openly campaigned for this war.

About a week before the war started, there was a wave of demonstrations across universities in Iran. The most notable event saw slogans in support of Pahlavi in some Iranian universities. We do not know how widespread they were, but this certainly marks a new era for student movements in Iran, which have historically been influenced by left-wing ideas.

Among those universities, the two most elite technical universities in Tehran, Sharif and Amirkabir, also saw pro-royalist, and therefore effectively pro-war, slogans. These universities, one of which I studied at, carry a certain historical weight in the student movement. As elite institutions, they often benefit from their standing in society. If elite students claim it to be so, then it is often assumed that it is, as they are, after all, supposedly the brightest of their generation.

These elites, however, have not necessarily entered these universities due to their special talent. The Islamic Republic has for many years overseen the extreme neoliberalisation of higher education, witnessing policies that effectively price out students from poorer parts of the country. This, in turn, has led to the gradual depoliticisation of campuses, to the extent now that parts of the student population would rather delegate all responsibility for (very necessary) change in Iran to a foreign power. After all, the “revolution” comes from Silicon Valley these days. The tech elite in Iran now speak in unison with their Silicon Valley prophets, who in turn are both encouraging and technologically-enabling Donald Trump to pursue a war that is apparently considered in their interests. But will these new Iranian tech elites benefit from the disruption of the country and the post-war era? We do not know, but it is hard to imagine that they would.

Anecdotal evidence from LinkedIn also shows many Iranians working in tech companies are among the loudest pro-Pahalvi/war narratives and using their social capital as highly skilled and talented foreign workers to further legitimise the attack on Iran.

This is only one part of this ecology. On the seemingly “other” side is the Islamic Republic, which has been using AI for surveillance long before this war. For instance, their facial recognition systems identify women who do not follow the state-approved hijab code and send fines directly to their homes, and in many cases confiscate the cars carrying those women. AI, in fact, has produced profit for the regime.

In this war, we do not know how much AI has been used in Iranian missile systems, but we know for sure that they rely on a highly sophisticated internet management infrastructure. The regime’s system can completely cut off access for ordinary Iranians while keeping the government’s own networks, and its machinery of repression fully operational. Iran has developed a national Internet, albeit not as rounded or effective as the Chinese version. The global Internet is still very much needed for ordinary usage.

Internet access is not a tap that can simply be turned off. The regime, for its own survival and defence, requires massive access to the global internet, while unplugging it for anything considered outside the operational needs of the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, ordinary Iranians whose livelihoods increasingly depend on the internet, whether through online commerce, services, gig-economy work on the web, or simply trying to access news about where to go next, if escape is even possible amid the constant bombing, are left disconnected.

From Silicon Valley to Tehran, tech elites move in harmony, and are all in the service of war.