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| ‘The strike that caused what is almost certainly the worst incident of civilian casualties in the war was, most likely, the result of a “targeting mistake” that relied on faulty data.’ Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images |
In recent weeks, concerns about AI have forged unlikely alliances in the tech and policy worlds. Tech moguls such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis joined Dario Amodei, Satya Nadella and Bill Gates in sounding the alarm about the dangers of AI and called for a slowdown of the technology’s development despite years of racing for dominance. The senator Bernie Sanders teamed up with Steve Bannon to urge Congress to regulate AI, which has become one of the very few issues to unite Americans across the political spectrum.
The latest moves were sparked in part by the AI researcher Jacob Coxon’s warnings on Twitter/X that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” and believe that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
The reality is, we don’t have to wait to see how AI will bring about unprecedented death and destruction, because we’ve already witnessed its unleashing.
Bill Gates’s nearly 6,000-word essay in late August warning about AI and its potential harms to humanity doesn’t come as a surprise. One of us has been a Microsoft employee for nearly a decade, witnessing all the dangers unfold in real time. Together, we’ve spent the past two years organizing with other Microsoft employees and activists to uncover the company’s role in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. We have collectively called on Microsoft to cut ties with the Israeli military.
But it’s not just Microsoft that is involved in AI-driven destruction.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza was a testing ground for the use of AI in warfare and the results were deeply disturbing. Israel’s military used AI to identify people to kill, with 12,000 targets generated and bombed in the first month alone. This was done with little to no meaningful human oversight, as documented in an investigation by Oscar-winning Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, whose latest film NAZA includes chilling testimonials by the soldiers involved.
Earlier this year in Iran, the US military launched an AI-involved airstrike that hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing 156 children, teachers and other civilians. The strike that caused what is almost certainly the worst incident of civilian casualties in the war was, most likely, the result of a “targeting mistake” that relied on faulty data.
The horrors wrought by AI aren’t limited to people overseas – they’re already being felt by vulnerable communities in the US The Department of Homeland Security is using AI tools – including Microsoft’s Azure – to monitor, arrest and deport immigrants at a massive scale. Law enforcement agencies nationwide are deploying facial recognition technology despite evidence of algorithmic bias that has led to the wrongful arrest and incarceration of Latino and Black Americans..READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/25/ai-israel-gaza-iran-police-surveillance