‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets
Executives were hopeful the relationship would continue to grow, thanks in part to the integration of the company’s technology and services in the most complex and secretive parts of the IDF’s operations.
The leaked documents illustrate how the US tech behemoth supported a range of sensitive activities, including:
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Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, was used by multiple military intelligence units, including Unit 8200 and Unit 81, which develops cutting-edge spy technology for Israel’s intelligence community.
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A system Israeli security forces use to manage the population registry and movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, known as “Rolling Stone”, was maintained using Microsoft’s technology.
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During the Gaza offensive, Microsoft’s suite of communications and messaging systems were used by Ofek, an air force unit responsible for managing large databases of potential targets for lethal strikes known as “target banks”.
Microsoft’s staff and contractors have also worked closely with military personnel across the IDF, providing advice and technical support both remotely and on military bases.
Do you have information about this story? Email [email protected], or (using a non-work phone) use Signal or WhatsApp to message +44 7721 857348.During the Gaza offensive, Microsoft engineers provided support to IDF intelligence units such as Unit 8200 and another secretive spy unit, Unit 9900 – which collects and analyses visual intelligence – to support their use of cloud infrastructure.
According to the files, between the start of the war in October 2023 and the end of June 2024, Israel’s defence ministry agreed to buy 19,000 hours of engineering support and consultancy services from Microsoft to assist a wide range of IDF units. The deals appear to have generated about $10m in fees for Microsoft.
‘A paradigm shift’
In a 2021 book the Washington Post reported that Google’s cloud division provided the IDF with access to its AI-based services.
The military’s use of OpenAI’s products such as its GPT-4 engine – a powerful AI model designed for natural language understanding and generation – also rose sharply in the first six months of the war, files suggest. Its access to the models was made via the Azure platform rather than directly through OpenAI.
At one stage in 2024, OpenAI’s tools accounted for a quarter of the military’s consumption of machine learning tools provided by Microsoft. The company has in recent years reportedly invested $13bn in OpenAI.
In January 2024, OpenAI Help
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