AI war in Iran has brought conflict to Silicon Valley. No one is ready

For years, Silicon Valley operated arsenic if warfare was idiosyncratic else’s problem. Operation Epic Fury proved otherwise. The U.S.-Israeli run against Iran, launched Feb. 28, pulled American exertion companies to the halfway of progressive warfare — not arsenic distant suppliers, but arsenic participants and present deliberate targets. In my forthcoming book, "The New AI Cold War," I warned this infinitesimal was coming. Iran made it real.

AI is moving the termination chain

CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper said it plainly successful a March 11 video update: AI tools assistance U.S. forces sift done immense information successful seconds truthful commanders marque decisions faster than the force tin react. Tasks that erstwhile took days present instrumentality seconds. Humans inactive o.k. the last targets. However, the instrumentality does the analysis.

At the bosom of that process is Palantir’s Maven Smart System, moving connected Anthropic’s Claude. NBC News confirmed that Palantir’s AI identified imaginable targets successful ongoing strikes. The Washington Post reported AI enabled U.S. forces to deed 1,000 targets successful the archetypal 24 hours.

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Retired Admiral Mark Montgomery told CBS News the subject present processes astir a 1000 targets a time with turnaround nether 4 hours — a gait nary erstwhile run has matched. Palantir CEO Alex Karp confirmed connected CNBC that Claude is inactive moving wrong the targeting strategy contempt the proviso concatenation designation.

Artificial quality is simply a large origin successful the Iran warfare and Iran realizes it. (iStock)

As I papers successful "The New AI Cold War," that displacement is present baked into doctrine. The classical Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop has shrunk to 2 steps: machines observe and decide; commanders orient and act. Strip distant the jargon and the meaning is plain — the instrumentality is present doing the thinking.

Ukraine was the proving ground

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Operation Epic Fury did not look from a vacuum. Ukraine was the laboratory. As "The New AI Cold War" documents, Ukraine’s integration of Palantir’s MetaConstellation — drafting connected Starlink satellites, upwind information and civilian smartphone uploads — compressed Kyiv’s full operations rhythm to instrumentality speed, helping offset Russia’s numerical advantage.

Ukraine retrained publically disposable AI models connected frontline combat information and deployed them crossed its drone fleet, boosting onslaught accuracy from 10–20% to 70–80%. Drones present relationship for 70–80 percent of battlefield casualties successful Ukraine, with AI targeting added to platforms for arsenic small arsenic $25 per unit.

Russia absorbed those lessons and passed them to Tehran. The Kremlin supplied Iran with Shahed-136 drones upgraded with AI navigation that defeats GPS jamming — exertion archetypal tested against Ukraine. And China supplies astir 80% of the captious technologies wrong Russian drones. That conjugation has been dilatory to registry successful Washington. It should not be.

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Silicon Valley is present successful the crosshairs

Iran drew the logical conclusion: if American subject powerfulness flows done servers, destruct the servers. The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency published a people database naming Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, IBM, Oracle and Palantir — 29 locations crossed the UAE, Israel, Qatar and Bahrain — captioned "enemy’s technological infrastructure."

This was not rhetoric. Iranian drone strikes had already deed 2 AWS information centers successful the UAE and a 3rd successful Bahrain earlier the database appeared. AWS confirmed structural damage, disrupted power, and occurrence suppression astatine its facilities. Nvidia’s banal fell astir 9% successful 2 days. Wall Street yet caught up to what each strategist already knew: U.S. subject powerfulness runs done servers arsenic surely arsenic it runs done F-35s.

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A state cipher talks astir could halt spot production

Consider the menace receiving astir nary attraction — and carrying the top economical effect for Americans astatine home. AI runs connected semiconductors. Semiconductors necessitate helium — non-substitutable nether existent manufacturing processes. Qatar produces a 3rd of the world’s helium astatine its Ras Laffan Industrial City. On March 2, Iranian drone strikes forced QatarEnergy to halt each production. Force majeure followed 2 days later. Subsequent strikes inflicted what QatarGas called "extensive" harm — yearly helium exports chopped 14%, repairs expected to instrumentality years.

Spot helium prices person doubled. Industry seasoned Phil Kornbluth told CNBC six-week resumption is best-case and "highly unlikely." South Korea sourced 64.7% of its helium from Qatar successful 2025; Taiwan sourced 69% from Gulf nations successful 2024. Together they clasp 36% of planetary spot production. No helium. No chips. No AI. And without AI, the subject borderline carrying this warfare degrades with it.

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The latest Robert Maginnis book, "The New AI Cold War: Liberty vs. Tyranny successful the Age of Machine Empires," digs into the AI struggle with Iran. (Defender Publishing LLC)

A warfare wrong the war

Anthropic — whose Claude exemplary is moving people investigation successful Iran — refused to let its exertion for autonomous lethal weapons oregon home surveillance. The Trump medication designated Anthropic a "supply concatenation risk" and moved to propulsion the contract. Anthropic sued. Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson was blunt: "America’s warfighters … volition ne'er beryllium held hostage by unelected tech executives and Silicon Valley ideology."

Claude remains embedded done a six-month phase-out. OpenAI has offered classified web access. Google has deployed AI agents for non-classified subject use. No settled rules govern what immoderate of these systems are authorized to do. Not yet.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, apical Democrat connected the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC News the military’s usage of AI successful targeting raises unanswered questions and said flatly: "This has to beryllium addressed." He is right. Researchers telephone the underlying information "automation bias" — operators nether unit defer to instrumentality outputs alternatively than question them. The schoolhouse onslaught successful confederate Iran that killed much than 170 people, astir of them children, is the quality look of what accountability failures successful AI targeting look like.

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Iran drew the logical conclusion: if American subject powerfulness flows done servers, destruct the servers. 

The bottommost line

This warfare is proving, successful existent time, that exertion infrastructure is subject infrastructure. Data centers are wartime targets. A state astir radical subordinate with enactment balloons is simply a strategical chokepoint. The world’s astir almighty AI targeting strategy is moving successful combat portion a national tribunal conflict implicit who controls it plays retired successful Washington.

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Ukraine proved AI reshapes battles. Iran is proving it reshapes everything other — proviso chains, fiscal markets and the companies that built these tools. Every American with a car, a smartphone, a pacemaker oregon an MRI instrumentality has a involvement successful however this ends.

The battlefield came to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was not ready.

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