Microsoft’s controversial collaboration with Israel: “AI models are directly being used in warfare”

A recent investigation has uncovered how the use of US companies’ commercial artificial intelligence models by Israel has soared since it began its war on Hamas after the terrorist group’s surprise attack on 7 October 2023. The Israel Defense Force has described AI as a “game changer,” allowing it to sift through massive troves of data to produce targets more quickly.

However, the investigation by the Associated Press also revealed that “faulty data and flawed algorithms” used by the AI systems when selecting targets can result in errors. According to health ministries in Gaza and Lebanon, more than 50,000 people have died in the two nations as Israel attempts to wipe out Hamas and Hezbollah.

Microsoft’s controversial collaboration with Israel

Microsoft’s relationship with the Israeli military goes back decades and is especially close compared to other US tech firms notes the AP. After the surprise attack by Hamas militants, which killed around 1,200 people and who took more than 250 hostages, the use of Microsoft’s computer servers to store vast amounts of data spiked according to internal company information reviewed by the outlet.

Usage of Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence systems was almost 200 times higher in March last year than before the 7 October attack. The amount of data doubled to over 13.6 petabytes between then and July 2024. For comparison, that is about 350 the digital memory one would need in order to store every book in the Library of Congress.

According to a presentation last year, Israel employed the services of Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services too as its own servers were strained on the sheer amount of data being processed. Col. Racheli Dembinsky, the top information technology officer of the Israeli military, said the AI had provided “very significant operational effectiveness.”

“AI models are directly being used in warfare”

An intelligence officer who works with the system told the AP that the Israeli military “uses Microsoft Azure to compile information gathered through mass surveillance, which it transcribes and translates, including phone calls, texts and audio messages.” The AI can then quickly go through the immense amounts of data to search for patterns or terms, including locating conversations between two people.

Furthermore, it can detect when those people are giving directions, which can be used to cross-checked with the IDF’s own data to pinpoint locations to target strikes.

There are concerns though as tech experts and those that have worked with the systems say that AI can produce errors for many reasons like incorrect translations from Arabic to Hebrew. This has led to targeting mistakes one intelligence officer who is tasked with taking the extra step of checking the translations told the AP.

“This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare. The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward,” Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and former senior safety engineer at OpenAI, told the AP.

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