Experts say the use of AI tools to enable attacks on Iran heralds a new era of bombing faster than the “speed of thought”, amid concerns that human decision-makers will be sidelined.

Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, was reportedly used by the U.S. military in focused attacks because the technology “shortens the kill chain (the process from target identification to legal authorization and attack initiation).”

The United States and Israel, which had previously relied on AI to identify targets in the Gaza Strip, launched nearly 900 strikes against Iranian targets in the first 12 hours alone, during which an Israeli missile killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Academics who study the field say AI is disrupting the planning time required for complex attacks. This is a phenomenon known as “decision compression,” and some worry that it could reduce human military and legal experts to simply rubber-stamping automated attack plans.

In 2024, San Francisco-based Anthropic deployed the model Impact across the U.S. Department of the Army and other national security agencies to expedite war planning. Claude will be part of a system developed by the war technology company Palantir in conjunction with the Department of Defense to “dramatically improve intelligence analysis and enable the agency’s decision-making process.”

“AI machines are suggesting what to target, and in some ways this is actually much faster than the speed of thought,” said Craig Jones, senior lecturer in political geography and kill chain expert at Newcastle University. “So you have scale and speed, you [carrying out the] This would cut off the regime’s ability to strike back with any airborne ballistic missiles, while also carrying out assassination-style attacks. Historical wars may have taken days or even weeks. [Now] You’re doing everything at once. ”

Modern AI systems can quickly analyze large amounts of information about potential targets, from drone footage to wiretaps to human intelligence. Palantir’s system uses machine learning to identify and prioritize targets and recommend weapons by considering stockpiles and past performance against similar targets. It also uses automated reasoning to assess the legal basis for strikes.

“This is the next era of military strategy and military technology,” said David Leslie, professor of ethics, technology and society at Queen Mary University of London, who observed the demonstration of the AI ​​military system. He also warned that reliance on AI could lead to “cognitive offload”. The humans tasked with making the decision to strike can feel indifferent to the outcome because the effort to think it through is done by a machine.

A missile attack on a school in southern Iran on Saturday killed 165 people, including many children, state media said. The attack appeared to be close to a military barracks, and the United Nations called it a “grave violation of humanitarian law.” The US military said it was investigating the report.

It is unclear what AI systems Iran has built into its war machine; claimed In 2025, it plans to utilize AI in its missile targeting system. Its own AI programs, hampered by international sanctions, seem insignificant compared to the AI ​​superpowers of the United States and China.

Days before the Iran attack, the U.S. government announced it would ban Anthropic from its systems because it refused to use AI for fully autonomous weapons or surveillance of U.S. citizens. However, it will continue to be used until it is phased out. Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI, quickly signed its own contract with the Department of Defense for military use of its model.

“The advantage is the speed of decision-making, where planning that previously took days or weeks collapses into minutes or seconds,” Leslie says. “While these systems provide a range of options to human decision makers, [they’ve] We obtained a narrower time window to evaluate the recommendations. ”

“The adoption of AI is growing,” said Prerana Joshi, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank. “It’s happening across the nation’s defense infrastructure, across logistics, training, decision management and maintenance.”

She further added, “AI is a technology that increases the productivity and efficiency of decision makers and everyone in their chain. AI is a way to synthesize data at a faster pace, which is useful for decision makers.”