For years, Silicon Valley operated as if war was someone else’s problem. Operation Epic Fury proved otherwise. The US-Israeli campaign against Iran, which launched on February 28, drew US technology companies into the center of active warfare – not as distant suppliers, but as participants and now deliberate targets. In my upcoming book, “The New AI Cold War,” I warned that this moment would come. Iran has made it a reality.
AI controls the kill chain
CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper put it plainly in a March 11 video update: AI tools are helping U.S. forces sift through massive data in seconds, helping commanders make decisions faster than the enemy can respond. Tasks that once took days now take seconds. People still approve of the ultimate goals. However, the machine does the analysis.
At the heart of that process is Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which runs on Anthropic’s Claude. NBC News confirmed that Palantir’s AI identified potential targets in ongoing attacks. The Washington Post reported that AI enabled US forces to hit a thousand targets in the first 24 hours.
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Retired Admiral Mark Montgomery told CBS News that the Army now processes about a thousand targets per day with a recovery time of less than four hours — a pace that no previous campaign has matched. Palantir CEO Alex Karp confirmed on CNBC that Claude is still active within the targeting system despite the supply chain designation.
Artificial intelligence is a big factor in the war against Iran and Iran realizes this. (iStock)
As I document in “The New AI Cold War,” that shift is now baked into doctrine. The classic Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop is reduced to two steps: observe machines and decide; commanders orient and act. Remove the jargon and the meaning is clear: the machine now does the thinking.
Ukraine was the testing ground
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Operation Epic Fury did not emerge from a vacuum. Ukraine was the laboratory. As “The New AI Cold War” documents, the Ukrainian integration of Palantir’s MetaConstellation – based on Starlink satellites, weather data and civilian smartphone uploads – compressed Kiev’s entire operations cycle to machine speed, offsetting Russia’s numerical advantage.
Ukraine retrained the publicly available AI models based on frontline combat data and deployed them in its drone fleet, increasing attack accuracy from 10-20% to 70-80%. Drones now account for 70 to 80 percent of battlefield casualties in Ukraine, while AI targeting is being added to platforms for as little as $25 per unit.
Russia has absorbed those lessons and passed them on to Tehran. The Kremlin provided Iran with Shahed-136 drones upgraded with AI navigation that beats GPS jamming – technology first tested in Ukraine. And China supplies roughly 80% of the critical technologies in Russian drones. That coalition has slowly registered in Washington. That shouldn’t be the case.
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Silicon Valley is now in the crosshairs
Iran drew the logical conclusion: if US military power flows through servers, destroy the servers. The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency published a list of targets named Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, IBM, Oracle and Palantir – 29 locations in the UAE, Israel, Qatar and Bahrain – captioned “the enemy’s technological infrastructure.”
This wasn’t rhetoric. Iranian drone strikes had already hit two AWS data centers in the UAE and a third in Bahrain before the list appeared. AWS confirmed structural damage, disrupted power and fire suppression at its facilities. Nvidia shares fell about 9% in two days. Wall Street has finally caught up to what every strategist already knew: US military power runs through servers as much as it does through F-35s.
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A gas no one is talking about could halt chip production
Consider the threat that gets almost no attention — and has the greatest economic impact on Americans at home. AI runs on semiconductors. Semiconductors require helium, which cannot be replaced in current manufacturing processes. Qatar produces a third of the world’s helium in its Ras Laffan Industrial City. On March 2, Iranian drone strikes forced QatarEnergy to halt all production. Force majeure followed two days later. Subsequent strikes caused what QatarGas called “extensive” damage: annual helium exports fell by 14%, repairs were expected to take years.
Spot prices for helium have doubled. Industry veteran Phil Kornbluth told CNBC that a six-week resumption is a best-case scenario and “highly unlikely.” South Korea got 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025; Taiwan took 69% from the Gulf countries in 2024. Together they account for 36% of global chip production. No helium. No chips. No AI. And without AI, the military edge of this war diminishes.
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Robert Maginnis’ latest book, “The New AI Cold War: Liberty vs. Tyranny in the Age of Machine Empires,” delves deeper into the AI conflict with Iran. (Defender Publishing LLC)
A war within the war
Anthropic – whose Claude model performs target analysis in Iran – refused to authorize its technology for autonomous lethal weapons or domestic surveillance. The Trump administration labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and decided to revoke the contract. Anthropically charged. Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson was blunt: “America’s fighting men … will never be held hostage by unelected tech executives and the ideology of Silicon Valley.”
Claude remains anchored during a six-month phase-out. OpenAI has offered secret network access. Google has deployed AI agents for unclassified military uses. There are no set rules that determine what these systems are authorized to do. Not yet.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC News that the military’s use of AI in targeting raises unanswered questions and said bluntly: “This needs to be addressed.” He’s right. Researchers call the underlying danger ‘automation bias’: operators under pressure delay machine output rather than question it. The school strike in southern Iran that killed more than 170 people, most of them children, is the human face of what failed accountability in AI targeting looks like.
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Iran drew the logical conclusion: if US military power flows through servers, destroy the servers.
The bottom line
This war proves in real time that the technological infrastructure is a military infrastructure. Data centers are targets in wartime. A gas most people associate with party balloons is a strategic bottleneck. The world’s most powerful AI targeting system is in battle, as a battle plays out in federal court in Washington over who controls it.
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Ukraine has proven that AI is reshaping combat. Iran is proving that it is reshaping everything else: its supply chains, its financial markets, and the companies that built these instruments. Every American with a car, a smartphone, a pacemaker or an MRI machine has a stake in how this turns out.
The battlefield reached Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley wasn’t ready for it yet.
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