AI May Win Battles in Iran, But Ukraine Startups Can Sway Wars
Ukraine’s use of startups to bolster its defenses is worth emulating.
Photographer: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images
British army leaders invited outsiders to a military exercise last spring. To the dismay of some attendees, only a handful of the roughly 50 folks allowed in to the battlefield headquarters worked for startups, with about 90% coming from established defense contractors and consultancies. That ratio should alarm anyone who has been watching the war unfold in Ukraine, as well as the more recent conflict in Iran.
The US military’s incursion in the Middle East has been described as the “first AI war,” where artificial intelligence tools such as Anthropic PBC’s Claude parse reams of intelligence signals to help make targeting decisions. The so-called kill chain — the steps between identifying a target and striking it — typically takes hours or days of human deliberation. But AI tools helped compress that sequence into 60 seconds for the strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Israeli military officials have said.