“They Make More Targets Faster”: US Tech Giants Supplied Israel with AI Models in Gaza Genocide, New Investigation Reveals

Occupied Palestine (Quds News Network)- U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft and OpenAI, have supplied Israel with AI models during its assault in Gaza and Lebanon, an Associated Press investigation revealed. These systems have been involved in targeting decisions and killing innocent people.

According to the investigation, Israel’s assaults in Gaza and Lebanon mark a leading instance in which commercial AI models made in the US have been used in active warfare. The Israeli military uses AI to sift through vast troves of intelligence, intercepted communications, and surveillance to find suspicious speech or behavior and learn the movements of its enemies.

The investigation was based on internal documents, data, and exclusive interviews with current and former Israeli officials and company employees.

Israel’s Use of Microsoft and OpenAL

Following the start of the Gaza assault, Israel’s use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology skyrocketed, according to the AP investigation, revealing new details of how AI systems select targets and ways they can go wrong, including faulty data or flawed algorithms.

Israel’s usage of Microsoft and OpenAI artificial intelligence spiked last March to nearly 200 times higher than before the week leading up to the assault, the AP found in reviewing internal company information.

The amount of data it stored on Microsoft servers doubled between that time and July 2024 to more than 13.6 petabytes — roughly 350 times the digital memory needed to store every book in the Library of Congress. Usage of Microsoft’s huge banks of computer servers by the military also rose by almost two-thirds in the first two months of the war alone.

Advanced AI models are provided through OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, through Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, where they are purchased by the Israeli military, the documents and data show. Microsoft has been OpenAI’s largest investor.

OpenAI claimed it does not have a partnership with Israel’s military, and its usage policies say its customers should not use its products to develop weapons, destroy property, or harm people. About a year ago, however, OpenAI changed its terms of use from barring military use to allowing for “national security use cases that align with our mission.”

The Israeli military told the AP that its analysts use AI-enabled systems to help identify targets and independently examine them together with high-ranking officers to meet international law, weighing the military advantage against the collateral damage.

“These AI tools make the intelligence process more accurate and more effective,” claimed an Israeli military statement to the AP. “⁠They make more targets faster, but not at the expense of accuracy, and many times in this war they’ve been able to minimize civilian casualties.”

How Israel Uses Al Models?

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, an Israeli intelligence officer who works with the systems told AP. That data can then be cross-checked with Israel’s in-house targeting systems and vice versa.

He said he relies on Azure to quickly search for terms and patterns within massive text troves, such as finding conversations between two people within a 50-page document. Azure also can find people giving directions to one another in the text, which can then be cross-referenced with the military’s own AI systems to pinpoint locations.

The Microsoft data AP reviewed shows that since the start of the assault on Gaza, the Israeli military has made heavy use of transcription and translation tools and OpenAI models, although it does not detail which. Typically, AI models that transcribe and translate perform best in English.

OpenAI has acknowledged that its popular AI-powered translation model Whisper, which can transcribe and translate into multiple languages including Arabic, can make up text that no one said, including adding racial commentary and violent rhetoric.

Google and Amazon Work With the Israeli Military

In March 2021, Google, along with Amazon, signed a $1.2bn contract for cloud computing services for the Israeli government and defense establishment.

The two companies provide Israel with the capacity to store, process, and analyze data, including facial recognition, emotion recognition, biometrics, and demographic information in what is known as Project Nimbus.

The deal received considerable attention in the mainstream media after Google and Amazon workers demanded an end to the contract by launching the campaign No Tech for Apartheid.

Anticipating this response, Google and Amazon signed a contract with Israel guaranteeing the continuation of services in the event of a boycott campaign. To date, they have held firm and continue to supply Israel with cloud computing services.

After OpenAI changed its terms of use last year to allow for national security purposes, Google followed suit earlier this month with a similar change to its public ethics policy to remove language saying it wouldn’t use its AI for weapons and surveillance. Google said it is committed to responsibly developing and deploying AI “that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”

Reliability of Al System

Errors can happen for many reasons involving AI, said Israeli military officers who have worked with the targeting systems and other tech experts.

Intercepted phone calls tied to a person’s profile include the time the person called and the names and numbers of those on the call. But it takes an extra step to listen to and verify the original audio, or to see a translated transcript.

The Israeli military said a person who knows Arabic is supposed to check translations. Still, one intelligence officer said he had seen targeting mistakes that relied on incorrect machine translations from Arabic to Hebrew.

Leaked Documents

Several leaked documents had revealed the Israeli military’s reliance on Microsoft’s cloud technology and AL systems and the surge of use during its bombardment of Gaza.

Microsoft deepened its relationship with Israel’s military after the Gaza assault, supplying the military with greater computing and storage services and striking at least $10m in deals to provide thousands of hours of technical support, an investigation published in January by the Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and a Hebrew-language outlet, Local Call. It is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own story, showed.

The leaked documents, which include commercial records from Israel’s defence ministry and files from Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary, suggested that Microsoft’s products and services, chiefly its Azure cloud, were used by units across Israel’s air, ground and naval forces, as well as its intelligence directorate.

While the military has used some Microsoft services for administrative purposes, such as email and file management systems, documents and interviews suggest Azure has been used to support combat and intelligence activities, the documents confirmed.

In recent years, documents also show, Microsoft has also provided the Israeli military with large-scale access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

During the Gaza offensive, Microsoft engineers provided support to Israeli 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.

In remarks revealed by +972 and Local Call, Col Racheli Dembinsky explained that the most significant advantage the cloud companies provided was their “crazy wealth of services”, including their advanced AI capabilities. Working with these companies, she said, provided the IDF with “very significant operational effectiveness” in Gaza.

Although Dembinsky did not mention the names of the cloud providers the IDF is now relying on, the Azure logo along with the logos of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud featured in her lecture slides.

According to analysis of the leaked documents, the Israeli military’s average monthly consumption of Microsoft Azure’s cloud storage facilities in the first six months of the war was 60% higher than in the four months leading up to the war.

The documents suggest the military’s consumption of Microsoft’s AI-based products also jumped in a similar period. By the end of March 2024, the military’s monthly consumption of Azure’s suite of machine learning tools was 64 times higher than in September 2023.

The Complicity of Big Social Media

Social media companies have also lent a helping hand to Israeli apartheid and occupation. In 2022, an outside report commissioned by Meta found that Facebook and Instagram’s speech policies showed bias against Palestinians. These longstanding practices of blatant censorship against Palestinians are continuing into the present.

In December, Human Rights Watch reported that Meta continues to crack down on pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram. Of 1,050 cases reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful content supportive of Palestine that was censored or suppressed – despite allowing a substantial amount of pro-Palestine content – and one removal in support of Israel. The company is even considering censoring the word “Zionist”.

Other organizations stand accused of censoring pro-Palestine voices, including X, YouTube and even China-owned TikTok. Western governments, including the US and the European Union, have been pressuring Big Social Media companies to review and censor content deemed “terrorist” or supportive of Palestine.