The Brief – The First AI War

Six years ago, this Brief imagined the ethical challenge that killer robots, possessing artificial intelligence and presumably looking like Terminator, would pose.

The issue has also been the focus of the European Parliament in 2018 and 2019 when MEPs called for an international ban on AI weaponry, stressing that “machines cannot make human-like decisions” and that humans should remain accountable for decisions taken during a war.

On 22 December 2023, 152 countries voted in favour of the General Assembly resolution on the dangers of lethal autonomous weapons systems, while four voted no, and 11 abstained.

Israel was among those who abstained.

Things have evolved in the meantime: Killing machines now have the abstract characteristic of an algorithm rather than the movie-friendly aspect of a humanoid robot.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres voiced serious concern on Friday (5 April) over reports that Israel was using artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza.

According to an investigative report by the website +972 and Local Call published two days before, the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based programme known as “Lavender”.

According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement in the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war.

Israel has reportedly marked thousands of Gazans as targets for assassination – and has used AI to identify them — in some cases with as little as 20 seconds of human oversight.

+972 is a quality media where Palestinian and Israeli journalists, activists, and thinkers can report on and analyse what is happening, guided by humanism, equality, and justice.

Two sources told +972 that the Israeli army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians as collateral victims.

But if the target was a senior Hamas official, the killing of more than 100 civilians was reportedly authorised.

The Israeli army has rejected the claims.

“Contrary to claims, the IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist,” the Israel Defence Forces said in a statement. “Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.”

But Guterres said he was “deeply troubled by reports that the Israeli military’s bombing campaign includes artificial intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties.”

“No part of life and death decisions which impact entire families should be delegated to the cold calculation of algorithms,” he said.

+972 further reported that the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night, while their whole families were present — rather than during military activity.

According to the sources, this was because it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.

Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed by +972 for the first time, were explicitly used to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family residences.

The result, as the +972 sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI programme’s decisions.

In one incident, sources said the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.

According to the sources cited by +972, Lavender marked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes. 

In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israelis have a homegrown facial recognition system called Blue Wolf, as the New York Times reported. At checkpoints in West Bank cities such as Hebron, Palestinians are scanned by high-resolution cameras before being permitted to pass.

But Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are not winning the Gaza war.

He hasn’t achieved any of his two objectives – destroying Hamas and bringing home the hostages, and he has lost the communication war globally and at home. Furthermore, he is playing with fire at the risk of losing the support of Israel’s most faithful ally – the United States.

Furthermore, charged with fraud, bribery and breach of trust in three cases filed in 2019, Netanyahu will probably get several years in jail after his term ends. 

And he may face other charges, including over his responsibility for war crimes committed also during this first AI war.

The Roundup

A future referendum on Catalonia’s possible independence from the rest of Spain “will cease to be unconstitutional and impossible,” similar to the imminent amnesty law for those involved in the 2017 secessionist attempt, Catalan President Pere Aragonès, of the separatist Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) formation party, said on Monday .

Portugal became the eighth European country to adopt the front-of-pack labelling Nutriscore on Friday after the European Commission failed to unveil a proposal for an EU-wide model.

The EU’s operation in the Red Sea to protect commercial ships from attacks by Houthi rebels is showing results but remains stuck in a small area of operation due to a lack of ships and other assets, officials said on Monday.

Economic and business ministers from France, Germany, and Italy are set to sketch out plans for a sweeping  ‘omnibus’ law to cut red tape and regulatory requirements for businesses on Monday, turbo-charging industrialists’ demand for a European Industrial deal.

Adapting the French economy to climate change could cost between €5 billion and €20 billion a year by 2050, impacting buildings, road and rail transport and crop farming, according to estimates revealed by government-funded think tank I4CE on Friday.

Look out for…

• Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič delivers keynote speech at ‘Future of EU industry: value chain resilience or dependence’ organised by EUROFER on Tuesday.
• Commission VP Vĕra Jourová receives Montenegro’s Deputy PM Aleksa Bečić on Tuesday.
• Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra chairs Clan Transition Dialogue with construction sector as part of New European Bauhaus Festival.
• Informal meeting of agriculture ministers Monday-Tuesday.
• European Parliament plenary in Brussels on Wednesday-Thursday.

Views are the author’s

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]