Thanks to “Project Maven,” the Pentagon’s AI-powered image-analysis program, “the war in Iran is one of the first conflicts where artificial intelligence systems play a central role in identifying and prioritizing targets, and where processing speed dictates the pace of operations,” writes Spain’s web media ARA. “The possibilities of this Maven system, combined with generative AI models such as Claude, of the firm Anthropic, allowed the Americans and Israelis to attack 3,000 targets during the first 24 hours of the offensive.”
This represents a true “metamorphosis of the battlefield,” in the words of retired Royal Air Force Marshal Martin Sammy Sampson. “We are facing an unprecedented phase of warfare, where decision-making has shifted towards large-scale algorithmic architectures that culminate years of secret experiments,” he states. Sampson is the executive director of the Middle East branch of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London.
