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AI's support for Gaza genocide exposes tech's dark side

Published : Wednesday, 16 April, 2025 at 12:00 AM  Count : 549
Amir Mohammed Khosru
Recently two software engineers, Ibtihal Aboussad from Canada and Vaniya Agrawal, an Indian-American have been terminated from Microsoft for their protest against the AI deal between Microsoft-Israel's army. We saw a video clip where Ibtihal Aboussad is shouting while Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman was delivering his presentation on Microsoft's 50th-anniversary celebrations in Redmond, Washington. We can see how Aboussad has confronted the Microsoft AI CEO with the shouting, "You claim that you care for using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty thousand people have died, and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region." Though she was quickly escorted out, we can see she was continuing her shouting "I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights," Agrawal similarly interrupted CEO Satya Nadella's speech. She accused the company of being "complicit" as a "digital weapons manufacturer that powers surveillance, apartheid, and genocide." She added, "By working for this company, we are all complicit."

This was not an isolated incident. Earlier in 2024, Google fired more than 50 employees after they staged sit-in protest opposing the company's $1.2 billion cloud computing and AI contract - named "Project Nimbus" - with the Israeli government. Google, alongside Amazon, was accused of providing tools that enhance Israel's surveillance capacity and military operations against Palestinians. At that time, protesters claimed this deal would make "easier for the Israeli government to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land".Their claim has proved also. Israel is using the hi-tech in Gaza Strip to track and kill the civilians. In Gaza, more than 54,000 people have been killed, 90% of the residential buildings have been flattened and more than 39 thousand children havebeen orphaned within just 17 months of war.

Technology giants like Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, IBM's Red Hat, Dell, Cisco- once associated with office work and civilian life are now conglomerated with Israel's warfare. Their cloud computing and artificial intelligence are helping Israeli forces to intercept phone calls, transcribe messages, analyze massive data troves, and identify targets within seconds. Once, these very technologies were created to serve humanity - to ease communication, improve healthcare and to enable smart business solutions. They are now transforming into tools of warfare. Artificial Intelligent (AI) once used for customer support, medical diagnosis and personal assistant is now assisting in surveillance, target identification and military strike.

Imagine this - a private conversation between two individuals is recorded, converted to text, analyzed by AI, cross-referenced with military databases, and within moments, a missile is fired at their location. This is not science fiction anymore - this is today's reality in Gaza. And every moment, this is going on with the help of tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon AWS and Chat GPT-4.

Though military uses their own technologies for the warfare, Israel's contract with the private tech giants sparked the world. Israel's uses of cloud computing and AI in Gaza wars mark a leading instance in which commercial AI models made in the United States have been used in active warfare. It seems U.S. tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged civilians more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) utilize Microsoft Azure to compile surveillance data, transcribe and translate phone calls, and analyze communications in real-time. For example, Azure can search through hundreds of pages of text to find conversations where directions are given - enabling the military to identify and strike moving targets. One of the IDF's said they rely more on Microsoft 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.

Israeli military officers who are engaged in the targeting would need to intercept phone calls tied to a person's profile that includes the time the person called and the names and numbers of those on the call. But it would take an extra step and times to listen to and verify the original audio, or to see a translated transcript. But now, with the help of cloud computing as well as AI processing, this work has become a matter of click on the computer keyboard. According to the IDFs, AI is a "game changer" in yielding targets more swiftly.

Cloud computing, once intended for flexible data storage and remote access, now functions as a "weapons platform." Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's cloud services have given the Israeli military unprecedented access to data processing, real-time surveillance, and automated decision-making tools.Amazon AWS, for instance, offers the IDF unlimited storage capacity to hold intelligence and audio files - reportedly containing information on nearly every person in Gaza. Soldiers have described using AWS systems during operations as casually as "ordering from Amazon" while executing combat missions.

Heidy Khlaaf, a former senior safety engineer at OpenAI, said "This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare. The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward."

What if similar technology platforms, especially those with large reservoirs of personal data at their disposal, follow the same path?Social media platforms have intimate information of billions of individuals- personal communications and location data to biometric records and psychological profiles inferred from online behavior. If we think of the days when social media platforms like Facebook (Meta), X (formerly Twitter), and even consumer-driven companies like Apple start transferring user data and behavioral analysis to military organizations under official contracts. The consequences are enormous and concerning. If this data ever flows directly into military systems, it could be deployed to spy, targeted propaganda or even precision strikes on the basis of models of predicted actions. National security and mass manipulation might become a thin and perilous.

This new intersection of technology and militarism requires immediate global conversation. Should there exist international ethical standards or virtual Geneva Conventions to regulate the use of civilian technologies in warfare? To what degree should tech companies bidding on military contracts be transparent? And finally, who will determine the line in the sand separating innovation and complicity?

The writer is a banker


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